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SIX LECTURES 
ON ARCHITECTURE 



THE UNIVERSITY OP CHICAGO PRESS 
CHICAGO. ILLINOIS 



agents 
THE BAKER & TAYLOR COMPANY 

NEW YOBK 

THE CUNNINGHAM, CURTISS & WELCH COMPANY 

LOB ANGELES 

THE CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS 

LONDON AND EDINBURGH 

THE MARUZEN-KABUSB3KI-KAISHA 

TOKYO, OSAKA, KYOTO, FUKT70KA, BENDAI 

THE MISSION BOOK COMPANY 

SHANGHAI 

KARL W. HIERSEMANN 



SIX LECTURES 
ON ARCHITECTURE 

BY 
RALPH ADAMS CRAM 

1! 

THOMAS HASTINGS 
CLAUDE BRAGDON 



THE SCAMMON LECTURES FOR 1915 
PUBLISHED FOR THE ART INSTITUTE 
OF CHICAGO BY THE UNIVERSITY OF 
CHICAGO PRESS, CHICAGO, ILLINOIS 






Copyright 1917 By 
The University of Chicago 



All Rights Reserved 



Published January igi7 



/ 



FEB -3 1917 



Composed and Printed By 

The University of Chicago Ftesa 

Chicago, Illinois, U.S.A. 



©CI.A455428 



NOTE 

/ T y HE lectures presented in this volume com- 
-* prise the eleventh series delivered at the 
Art Institute of Chicago on the Scammon foun- 
dation. The Scammon Lectureship is established 
on an ample basis by the bequest of Mrs. Maria 
Sheldon Scammon, who died in igoi. The will 
prescribes that these lectures shall be upon the 
history, theory, and practice of the fine arts 
(meaning thereby the graphic and plastic arts), 
by persons of distinction or authority on the 
subject on which they lecture, such lectures to 
be primarily for the benefit of the students of 
the Art Institute, and secondarily for members 
and other persons. The lectures are known as 
i( The Scammon Lectures." 



TABLE OF CONTENTS 

PAGE 

Lecture I. The Beginnings of Gothic 

Art .3 

Lecture II. The Culmination of 

Gothic Architecture . . '33 

By RALPH ADAMS CRAM 

Lecture III. Principles of Architec- 
tural Composition . . . -67 

Lecture IV. Modern Architecture . 98 

By THOMAS HASTINGS 

Lecture V. Organic Architecture . 123 
Lecture VI. The Language of Form . 145 

By CLAUDE BRAGDON 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 

[The illustrations face the pages designated unless otherwise indicated.] 

LECTURE I 

PAGE 

Sant' Ambrogio 8 

Durham Cathedral — West Front 14 

Abbaye aux Dames, Caen — Interior .... 20 

Ely Cathedral — West Front 26 

Vezelay Cathedral — West Doors 30 

LECTURE II 

Chartres Cathedral — Interior 36 

Bourges Cathedral — Nave 40 

Rheims Cathedral — West Front 44 

Notre Dame, Paris 48 

Laon Cathedral — West Front 52 

Beauvais Cathedral — South Transept . . . -56 

Lincoln Cathedral — East End 60 

LECTURE III 

Giralda Tower and Cathedral, Seville ... 70 

Cathedral and Giralda Tower, Seville . . 76 
Cathedral and Campanile, Florence 

from Or S. Michele 82 

Milan Cathedral 88 

Ospedale Maggiore, Milan — Three Windows . . 94 

LECTURE IV 
Chateau de Blois — Aile de Louis XII, Facade . . . 1 00 

Tours Cathedral 106 

Church of St. Etienne du Mont, Paris . . .112 

Apse of Church of St. Pierre, Caen . . . .118 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS— Continued 

LECTURE V 

PAGE 

Palace of Versailles 130 

Mont-Saint-Michel 132 

Santa Sophia, Constantinople 134 

Houses of Parliament, London 136 



LECTURE VI 
Pine Tree on an Island — Hiroshige 
Bas-Relief of Athena and Her Owl 
Portrait of Madame Recamier — David . 
Roman Ionic Arcade by Vignole 
Doorway, Church of Saint Trophime, Arles 
Madonna del Sacco — Andrea del Sarto 
Application of the Equilateral Triangle to 

the Erechtheum at Athens 
Sacred and Profane Love — Titian . 
The Last Supper — Leonardo da Vinci 
Pattern Derived from Grouped Cubes 

A Bay Window 

Pattern Derived from the 6oo-Hedroid 
Projection of the 6oo-Hedroid on a Plane 

An Organ Case 

Geometrical "Web" and Ornament Derived 

from the 60o-hedroid 

The Water Gate 

Tetrahedrons and Derived Ornament . 
Formation of the Magic Square of Three 
Knots from Magic Lines .... 
Book Cover Design Based on the Knight's 

Tour or Magic Square of Eight 
x 



. 148 
. 149 
. 150 
On 151 
. 152 
. 152 

On 153 
. 154 
. 156 

On 162 
. 162 

On 164 

On 164 
. 164 



On 166 
. 166 
On 167 
On 168 
On 168 

On 169 



THE PROMISE AND THE FULFILMENT 
OF GOTHIC ARCHITECTURE 

BY 
RALPH ADAMS CRAM 



THE BEGINNINGS OF GOTHIC ART 

All great architecture is organic; every 
building that has endured, or will endure, as a 
monument of good art is, in a very real sense, 
a living organism. Like the horse, the tiger, or 
the eagle, all its parts are perfectly adapted to 
their function, admirably co-ordinated, deter- 
mined by exact considerations of the adaptation 
of means to end, and expressed in forms and 
lines that are in themselves beautiful. Like 
man, it also is possessed of spirit, and the com- 
bination of these two elements gives it an actual 
life and almost places it in the category of the 
creatures that exist by the will, and at the hand, 
of God. 

The variations in style between one century 
and another are as human variations in race 
and speech, and as those wide intervals that 
separate one epoch of high civilization from 
another of a correspondingly low type, or from 
those intermediate stages which form the major 
part of history. Like the life it so closely re- 
sembles and so exactly represents, architecture 
is a thing of infinite but rhythmical vicissitudes, 



LECTURES ON ARCHITECTURE 

with brief periods of supreme achievement inter- 
spersed with long intervals of slow rise and swift 
decline, and again, like life, it shows no progres- 
sive growth, no tendency toward earthly perfec- 
tion. If there are moments when the art crests 
in such splendid accomplishment as occurred in 
Greece, in Byzantium, in the Middle Ages, it 
cannot be said that as a whole the later mani- 
festations reached higher levels than the earlier, 
their individual excellence being only in certain 
categories. 

In every case, however, there is a close rela- 
tionship between this art (and its allied arts) and 
the civilization that brought it into being. There 
is no great art with an immediately antecedent 
condition of barbarism; there is no degraded art 
in close succession from a high civilization. Art 
and life do not synchronize; they form a sequence, 
and as art itself comes at and after the cresting 
of a wave of human development, we often find 
a strange contemporaneousness of noble art and a 
civilization that already has begun to decay. 

To understand a style, therefore, it is necessary 
to do more than scrutinize its material elements, 
determining by scientific methods its line of sty- 
listic descent and the peculiarities of its organic 
mechanism. This is, it must be admitted, the 
usual course, and it lands both historian and 

[4] 



BEGINNINGS OF GOTHIC ART 

student in such a dilemma as that which con- 
fronts those who, confining their scrutiny to the 
material elements alone, find the Gothic of 
France the most logical and perfectly worked-out 
manifestation of a style that was almost Europe- 
wide, and therefore, since the other national 
modes fall short of this, deny to these even the 
once derided, now universally revered, style of 
"Gothic." 

This process is less architectural history and 
criticism than it is architectural biology and 
pathology. In architecture, as in all arts, in all 
existence, it is the spirit that giveth life; and 
it is not the forms, it is the spirit behind and 
within Greek, Byzantine, Gothic, and Chinese 
Buddhist architecture that makes each live, as 
do not the other epochs of its varied and illum- 
inating career. 

Fully to understand the great significance of 
that era of architectural growth which, beginning 
roughly with the year iooo, goes on with ever- 
increasing vigor until it culminates about three 
centuries later, we should have to study not 
alone the rise of Romanesque, its transition into 
the first Gothic, its astounding climax in the 
first quarter of the thirteenth century, and its 
slow and splendid decay through another two 
hundred years; we should also have to merge 

[5] 



LECTURES ON ARCHITECTURE 

ourselves in the intricate history of this great 
period of five centuries, in its political and eco- 
nomic development, its philosophical adventures, 
its crusades and guilds and communes, above 
all in those religious experiences and determina- 
tions that are its greatest exemplification as they 
are its underlying cause. 

Manifestly this is impossible within the scope 
of two lectures. It is the labor of years (if it is 
not the illumination of a moment) and not now 
for us. All we can do is to note the most salient 
points and block out the main lines of what I 
hope for many may be subsequently a study as 
revealing as it is absorbing. 

I need not remind you of the original signifi- 
cance of the word "Gothic" — how it was given 
in scorn by the self-sufficient amateurs of the 
Renaissance to the art they had inherited but 
could neither appreciate nor rival. To them the 
word and the work meant anything barbarous 
and illiterate, and illuminating as this is on the 
point of their own intelligence, it is, I think, 
hardly so discreditable as is that effort, of which 
I have already spoken, on the part of modern 
commentators to reduce one of the most inspired 
and inspiring arts to the terms of a few structural 
formulae. Gothic architecture and Gothic art 
were an impulse and a tendency: as the Greeks 
[6] 



BEGINNINGS OF GOTHIC ART 

took the simplest conceivable architectural norm 
and developed it to final perfection, so the 
mediaeval builders took the most complicated 
problem and tried to develop it to that point of 
perfection which they saw in some beatific vision, 
and which was actually beyond the power of man 
to attain. 

Of course they failed; but they left, not a 
perfected thing subject neither to change nor to 
improvement, but a stimulating force ever in- 
citing men to take up the work they left unfin- 
ished, and high-heartedly to strive once more to 
achieve the unattainable. 

To this extent it was a greater art than had 
been known before; for its aim was higher, its 
goal more clearly revealed, and this goal was 
that which lies at the very root of art itself, viz., 
the symbolical expression of otherwise inexpres- 
sible ideas, i.e., those which by their very nature 
are so high that they transcend all ordinary and 
direct modes of human expression. Consciously 
or unconsciously, mediaeval art was at bottom 
sacramental, and this explains, in a way, its 
immortality, its constantly recurring appeal, as 
it explains the same immortality and appeal by 
sacramental religion and sacramental philosophy 
— as of St. Bernard and St. Thomas Aquinas and 
Hugh of St. Victor — for it is only such art, such 

[7] 



LECTURES ON ARCHITECTURE 

philosophy, such religion, that will permanently 
endure, since these alone are in eternal conformity 
with life, which also is essentially and unchange- 
ably sacramental. 

Between mediaeval civ lization and mediaeval 
art the connection was so close as to amount to 
practical identity. Rheims, Freiburg, Canter- 
bury, are simply the Middle Ages made visible 
and translated into the terms of an enduring and 
dynamic influence. All the joy of life, the vivid 
vitality, the humor, romance, and mysticism, 
the simplicity and naivete of that opulent age 
find outlet through the wrought stone and wood, 
glass, and metal that assembled under eager 
hands and at the impulse of ardent brains to 
create that plexus of all the arts, a mediaeval 
cathedral. We may read history without limit 
and delve in original records for years without 
acquiring as much sense of the real mediaevalism 
as we could obtain through a day in Bourges or 
York or Strasburg — if only there we could find 
what once was: all the arts assembled together 
to make a Mass as it was before the shrines and 
altars and windows were broken, and the bizarre 
music and tawdry ceremonial of the nineteenth 
century took the place of the massive Gregorians 
and the solemn ritual of the fourteenth century. 
Even now, however, in such a church as Chartres 
[8] 



BEGINNINGS OF GOTHIC ART 

or Seville it is possible to re-create the dead past, 
as is impossible in schoolroom or study or 
lecture-hall. 

Gothic art is a great unit, and into this enter 
certain traditional, ethnic, and religious elements 
that determine, not only its spirit, but its form as 
well. Under the first heading we have all the 
classical heritage from Rome and the East 
through the Latin South of France and the 
pseudo-Byzantine Carolingians; under the sec- 
ond, the dominating northern blood, which, 
whether Frank, Norman, or Burgundian, wholly 
succeeded and dominated the decadent blood of 
the South; under the third, that all-embracing 
Catholicism which was the moving and regen- 
erating force, directing, controlling, inspiring, 
through monastic establishments, military orders, 
and the crusades. 

The Romanesque of the eleventh and twelfth 
centuries in all Europe, the Gothic of the thir- 
teenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries in 
Flanders, France, Spain, and England, were the 
direct expression of the greatest and most benefi- 
cent religious reformation ever recorded in 
Christendom, carrying in its train a civil reforma- 
tion that redeemed western civilization from the 
Dark Ages and built up for the first time a great 
and measurably consistent Christian society. It 

[9] 



LECTURES ON ARCHITECTURE 

shows it; for of all art it is at once the most com- 
petent and the most inspired, mingled equally of 
active reason, good sense, brilliant thinking, and 
a spiritual emphasis, a final idealism that we 
may search long in world-annals to equal. 

Beginning at the hands of monks of many 
orders, this art infused the whole Church, being 
taken up at last by the bishops and focused in 
the vast and innumerable cathedrals, and so 
extended through the laity, high and low, until 
it became an intimate and indispensable attribute 
of life itself. 

The material and structural development of 
Gothic architecture was a result neither of sud- 
den revelation nor of headlong evolution; it was 
a phenomenon of slow and logical growth. In 
plan, structure, and organism, it reaches back 
through Norman, Romanesque, Lombard, By- 
zantine, and Syrian trails to Rome itself. Even 
in the basilicas of the Eternal City we find the 
nave and aisles separated by columns and arches, 
the colonnaded triforium and clerestory, the 
transept, choir, and apse. Transferred to the 
shores of the Bosporus, the Roman mode of 
building is divided into two followings — the 
basilican and the domical. Here they are sepa- 
rated, the Eski Djouma and St. Demetrius in 
Salonica being very noble examples of the first; 
[10] 



BEGINNINGS OF GOTHIC ART 

Aya Sophia in the same city, SS. Sergius and 
Bacchus, the churches of the Pantokrator and 
the Chora, and of course Aya Sophia itself, in 
Constantinople, immortal examples of the second. 
Both are strictly Roman in origin; but as under 
Constantine the basilican type was vastly en- 
riched and developed over its Roman prototype, 
so under Justinian the domical and cellular mo- 
tive was elaborated into the almost unimagin- 
able splendor of that most glorious church, 
where, after five centuries of alien occupation, 
we are now permitted to believe that we our- 
selves may see the Christian Sacrifice offered 
once more in petition and in expiation. 

In Syria and Byzantium, Roman architecture 
first became structurally and artistically con- 
sistent, and the work of Justinian, through his 
Greek architects and under a majestic religious 
faith blended with the Christianized splendor of 
the East, must be considered as one of the great 
styles in history. Perfect as it was in all its 
internal organism and decoration, it never worked 
out a corresponding exterior, although, when 
both basilican and domical types were imported 
into Italy and Greece under the Exarchs, in 
certain places, particularly in the latter, this last 
development began, as in the exquisite little 
monasteries of Styris and Daphne. 

[ii] 



LECTURES ON ARCHITECTURE 

It was too late, however; the stimulus of a 
vital civilization had passed, and the evolution 
was left for other hands and other races. This 
came in part with the introduction of the strong 
northern blood of the Lombards. The old 
basilican mode had been carried on in Rome on 
Christian lines after the Edict of Milan in 313, 
but the Lombards after 568 introduced a totally- 
new spirit, and in Toscanella, and later in Pisa, 
Verona, Lucca, Milan, we see the striking results 
of a radically new departure marked by an im- 
pulse as northern as all that had gone before had 
been southern. 

Venice was always a splendid anachronism, a 
Byzantine colony in the midst of aliens, and 
St. Mark's is not in the line of architectural 
descent, which for the future was to be under 
the direction of the supreme North. 

There was, however, one element of great mys- 
tery and equal uncertainty, the influence of the 
Comacini. There are those who attribute to 
them all that afterward . was evolved under the 
Carolings, the Normans, and the Franks; others 
who look on them as half mythical and wholly 
ineffective. For my own part, I incline, for once, 
toward a middle ground, believing in their un- 
doubted existence and their persistent influence, 
but finding in the new and vital power of northern 
[12] 



BEGINNINGS OF GOTHIC ART 

blood, fixed by monastic fervor for righteousness, 
not only the unique bent toward new and splen- 
did things, but also the elan that alone could 
revitalize a tradition already moribund. 

These Comacini were the colonies or guilds of 
free builders (some call them free masons and 
the progenitors of the modern secret societies of 
the same name) who fled from Rome in the midst 
of its downfall and sought refuge on an island in 
Lake Como, in a region still under the evanescent 
protection of the empire of New Rome, or Byzan- 
tium. They are held to have brought with them 
in their exile, not only the traditions of Roman 
building, but dim memories and symbolisms 
from the East, even from Jerusalem itself. Here, 
in this island refuge, were preserved through the 
Dark Ages the sole surviving tradition of the old 
building of the days of classical culture, and 
when at last Charlemagne desired to restore the 
art of architecture again, it is from this island 
that he drew his builders, who thereafter spread 
slowly over Europe, founding new lodges and 
transmitting to their successors the methods and 
secrets and traditions of the immortal past. 

Much of the evidence to support this theory is 
circumstantial, but it must be admitted that it 
is cumulative and generally convincing, and 
those who are interested in an obscure and 

[13] 



LECTURES ON ARCHITECTURE 

tempting quest may follow it readily in Leader 
Scott's Cathedral Builders, which, while not 
always reliable as to dates and attributions, is 
full of an immense amount of incontestible 
testimony. 

That the early "Lombard" work of the eighth 
century in Italy, as at Toscanella, is novel and 
vividly original as well as competent and beau- 
tiful, is undeniable, and the peculiar qualities 
there shown reveal themselves century after 
century in Normandy, Burgundy, and the Rhine 
country, as well as in Lombardy itself, until in 
the twelfth century they come full-flower in 
Padua, Verona, Pavia, Milan, Lucca, and Pisa. 
In Italy it is a distinguished and an exquisite 
style, vital and intelligent, quick with invention, 
and with a certain wild charm that well covers 
its — sometimes refreshing — naivete and even 
barbarism. In the North it shows itself in many 
ways, though here rather as a bending, not a 
controlling, influence. We find it at Cluny, at 
Jumieges, at Caen, and it is impossible now to 
say how much of this persistent and wide-spread 
quality may be due to the successors of the old 
Roman guilds, how much to the latent force in 
the Lombardic race. Some line of succession 
was operative, influencing many peoples in many 
lands and spreading far and wide, not methods 

[14] 




DURHAM CATHEDRAL— WEST FRONT 



BEGINNINGS OF GOTHIC ART 

of building alone, not types of ornament such as 
the interlacing strands and the wild things from 
the forests, but an elaborate and mystical sys- 
tem of symbolism as well, so fully worked out 
that the monk Durandus in the eleventh century 
had it all at his finger ends. 

Between the two types we are considering, the 
question was live loads versus dead loads. The 
basilica was inactive; its small nave arches had 
little thrust and its apse semi-dome also; the 
great triumphal arch to the choir was the only 
thing that was seriously active. The domical 
structure, even when its domes and vaults were 
of concrete, was always pushing in every direc- 
tion and putting a premium on that ingenuity 
that was always busy devising balancing thrusts. 
In spite of its simplicity and inexpensiveness, the 
basilica yielded to the dome, partly for material 
considerations of permanence and fire protec- 
tion, partly because the northern mind was not 
content with easy tasks. By 900 a.d., in Sant' 
Eustorgio in Milan, transverse arches were being 
thrown across the aisles from each pier, thus 
involving the first rudimentary buttresses. In 
985, as at the Church of Santi Felice e Fortunato 
in Vicenza, these transverse arches were thrown 
across the nave itself, as long before in Syria, 
usually on the alternating system. Then from 

[15] 



LECTURES ON ARCHITECTURE 

the domical buildings of Syria, Byzantium, and 
Ravenna came the masonry vaulting of the 
smaller areas, and at last the masonry con- 
struction of the high vault. 

Before this last innovation, which brought 
the whole system of Gothic construction and 
organism in its train, the ribbed vault had to 
be devised. When this happened no one knows, 
but it was probably a northern invention and 
meant the ultimate transformation of the simple 
Roman organism into the most nervous and 
highly articulated creation of the hand of man. 
The aisle rib vaults at Montefiascone may be 
original; if so, they date from 1032. The high 
vault of Sant' Ambrogio is also doubtful and may 
be of the year 1060. The present weight of evi- 
dence points to Normandy, or even Durham in 
England, where the ribbed vault is of the year 
1093, but for my own part I believe it is Lom- 
bard; for it is exactly in line with other undoubted 
inventions of the same ingenious race. 

Whatever its source, this ribbed and domed 
vault was the greatest discovery of man in archi- 
tecture, after the arch and the dome, and its 
suppleness, adaptability, and perversity in the 
matter of thrusts were stimulating to a degree. 

The development of the compound pier and 
archivolt and of the alternating system followed 
[16] 



BEGINNINGS OF GOTHIC ART 

hand in hand with the evolution of the ribbed 
and domed vault. The oblong vaulting spaces 
for the nave, in place of square areas, were worked 
out in Normandy through the abbeys of Caen, 
by means of sexpartite stages, and at last the 
flying buttress, which has grown from the arched 
abutments of Sant' Ambrogio, through the half- 
barrel vaults of the Abbaye aux Hommes, to 
the true flying buttress of the Abbaye des Dames, 
which was still modestly concealed below the 
roof. At Noyon, about 1260, it emerged into the 
light of day, and at the same time the pointed 
arch, which is first recorded in France in the 
Abbey of Cluny at the end of the eleventh cen- 
tury, achieved complete acceptance, partly be- 
cause of its adaptability, chiefly because of its 
beauty, and not at all because it aided in the 
vaulting of oblong compartments — as is so often 
claimed — simply because it never was so used, 
the device of stilting having already solved that 
problem and made possible those subtle waved 
surfaces that were and are the joy of the architect. 
In the processes thus far narrated we have 
acquired most of the elements in the Gothic 
system: compound shaft and arch, ribbed, 
domed, and stilted vaults (quadripartite, sex- 
partite, and oblong), buttresses, flying buttresses, 
pointed arches, while the vertical system of 

[17] 



LECTURES ON ARCHITECTURE 

arcade, triforium, and clerestory, and the great 
west towers are fully established through such 
monuments as Jumieges, the abbeys of Caen, 
St. Germer de Fly, and St. Denis. With the last 
building comes the perfected chevet, that incom- 
parable masterpiece of mediaeval genius, with 
its polygonal apse, doubled aisles, and ring of 
chapels. At first it would seem that this was a 
special creation of Gothic intelligence, if not of 
divine revelation, but stupendous as it is, it was 
a development of successive stages from a very 
old and equally simple norm. What has hap- 
pened was this, and I think it very interesting. 
The Syrian builders of the dioceses of Damas- 
cus and Antioch had taken the primitive Roman 
basilica — secular and pagan — and added to the 
east end that semicircular apse which first 
appears here in one or two heathen temples of 
the early second century. They thus obtained 
the standard type of the Christian basilica which 
has persisted even to this day, whatever may 
have been its racial impulse or its stylistic ex- 
pression. Then they cut this apsed basilica in 
two and took the simple semicircular apse with 
its semi-dome to see what they could make of it. 
They made much. First they completed it into a 
circle; then they developed the little curved 
niches of some of the early apses into true, but 
[18] 



BEGINNINGS OF GOTHIC ART 

subordinate, apses, applied directly to the per- 
imeter of the circle; they next raised the wall to 
provide a clerestory of windows and encircled the 
whole at the ground level with a polygonal aisle. 
The memory of this early form in Syria is still 
preserved in the much later San Vitale at Ra- 
venna. The result was a great organism, though 
not perfectly articulated. In such a church as 
that at Bosrah, however, this defect was reme- 
died; for here the aisle encircles the central 
dome, and the apses are pushed to the outer 
wall. The articulation is now complete, and 
aesthetically the result affords the most won- 
derful play of light and shade imaginable. On 
the basis of this unique development — which 
surely worked itself out in the great days of the 
Church in Antioch and was utterly forgotten 
under the desolation that followed the Moslem 
invasions, even until the last century — were 
reared all the wonderful structures of Byzantium, 
of Charlemagne, and of Southern France, as for 
example, Aya Sophia, Aix-la-Chapelle, and Tou- 
louse. By the introduction of a square area 
between two apses, and with its dome supported 
on pendentives — a device already used in Syria — 
and with its aisle curtailed and raised into two 
stories, we have the first; with an increase of 
height and the introduction of a triforium level, 

[19] 



LECTURES ON ARCHITECTURE 

the second; while in the apse of the third we find 
the most extraordinary change of all — nothing 
less than the cutting of the circle in halves again, 
the full evolution having been accomplished, and 
the application of this half to its original position 
at the end of the old basilica, now equally trans- 
formed. Behold, then, with the other newly 
devised elements I have already named, and with 
its articulation raised to the point of finality, 
Bourges, Chartres, Rheims, Westminster — the 
finished and ineffable product, the definitive 
Gothic church. 

Such is the structural evolution from 200 a.d. 
until 1 100 a.d., one of the most remarkable 
exemplifications of the power of human intellect 
when it is infused by a vital religious faith and — 
for the last six of these nine centuries at least — by 
clean new blood and an almost abnormal vitality. 
In this process certain buildings stand as mile- 
stones, though we must always remember that, 
so far as dates are concerned, this credit may be 
partially undeserved, since it is possible, if not 
probable, that the truly era-making works — 
those, that is, in which some master-builder 
struck out first of all men some revolutionary 
and prolific device — have been utterly destroyed 
or buried under the desert sand of Moslem devas- 
tation or the heaped debris of revolution. On 
F20I 




ABBAYE AUX DAMES, CAEN— INTERIOR 



BEGINNINGS OF GOTHIC ART 

the basis of what remains, however, these build- 
ings are: the church at Bosrah, Charlemagne's 
church at Aix-la-Chapelle, Sant' Ambrogio, Jumi- 
eges, the two abbeys of Caen, St. Germer de Fly, 
and St. Denis. In the first two of these we find 
the promise and potency of the chevet; in the 
third, the germs that were to develop into at 
least three of the essential elements of Gothic; 
in the fourth, the main qualities of Gothic mass 
and organism; in the two Caen abbeys, the norm 
of all French cathedrals on the one hand, of all 
English abbeys and cathedrals on the other; in 
St. Germer, the actual chevet itself, as the North 
translated and glorified the dim prophecies of 
the East; and in St. Denis, the final gathering 
up of everything in preparation for the great 
flowering that was to come in less than fifty 
years. It was a masterly sequence, and it postu- 
lates a great civilization behind; for after all, thus 
far we have considered only the structural evolu- 
tion. The qualities which give all this art, whether 
Byzantine, Romanesque, or Gothic, its supreme 
character are those subtle qualities of beauty, 
inspiration, and evocative power which are the 
vivifying spirit of great art and follow only from 
a potent civilization. 

Now while there was no violent revolution, no 
artificial swerving of the line of development, 

[21] 



LECTURES ON ARCHITECTURE 

such as occurred, for example, in the case of the 
Renaissance, there was a great transformation 
in the spirit that was working in the world and 
dominating it. If we are to gain any idea of 
what this was and why it was so potent, you 
must bear with me while I revert to a little 
ancient, and very ancient, history. 

By the year 500 Rome had fallen, and classical 
civilization had become a name. Over the dis- 
appearing frontiers of empire poured the hordes 
of northern barbarians, and only the successor of 
St. Peter was left in a desolated city to bear wit- 
ness against anarchy, heresy, and chaos. And 
yet, in the crash of toppling empires, in the 
North the king of the Franks was baptized, and 
in Rome itself Gregory the Great mounted the 
chair of Peter. From him went out the streams 
of energy that were to redeem and transform the 
northern hordes, through the agency of those 
monks who had accepted the Holy Rule of St. 
Benedict, who himself was the center and the 
energizing power of the new era that was to last 
for a thousand years. 

Neither Rome nor its successor, Catholic civil- 
ization, was built in a day, and it took five full 
centuries to bring the work of St. Benedict to 
final fruition. There was a short-lived and par- 
tial success under Charlemagne, but ruin followed 
I22I 



BEGINNINGS OF GOTHIC ART 

after, and it was not until 927 that St. Odo 
reformed the sterile Benedictinism of the Dark 
Ages and, through the order of Cluny, made it 
operative again as its great founder would have 
had it. Almost at the same moment Otto the 
Great restored civil order under a regenerated 
Holy Roman Empire, St. Bruno began the 
building of Germanic civilization, and Hugh 
Capet with Bishop Gerbert set out on their 
task of re-creating civilization in France. By 
the year 1000 the Normans had become fixed 
in Northern France, Christianized and ready 
for action; the curtain rose, and the splen- 
did drama of mediaevalism began to unfold 
itself. 

The first act is the era of a new Benedictinism 
and what we call Romanesque and Norman 
architecture. To this mode the Benedictine was 
always devoted, and he made it a thing of power 
and nobility and — in the end — inordinate rich- 
ness. He began where Byzantium and Charle- 
magne left off; he re-created architecture on 
Christian lines, but he could not continue to the 
end, for the reason that monasticism, while in- 
destructible in essence, is human in its agencies, 
therefore fallible, and doomed after each century 
to sink to a point where a reformation is 
imperative. 

[23] 



LECTURES ON ARCHITECTURE 

As the Cluniac wave so spent itself, it slipped 
slowly back into a very human corruption, and 
its art took on a splendor and a magnificence 
that defeated its own ends. Then came the 
inevitable reform in the shape of the great Cis- 
tercian revolt against luxury of life and laxity 
of morals and an unwholesome sumptuousness in 
art. The Cluniac and the Norman created 
Romanesque, the Cistercian and Frank created 
Gothic, and Gothic in its beginnings was a 
puritanical revolt against a too splendid art. 

It was well that this should be so, for at once 
men's minds were turned from ornament to form, 
structure — in a word, to organism, which is archi- 
tecture. The round arched Benedictine style 
was becoming a thing too costly to be endured; 
too costly in its enormous masses of masonry, 
too costly in its florid and superabundant decora- 
tion. At first St. Bernard would have not even a 
carved moulding, no stained glass, no costly fur- 
nishings, no sumptuous ceremonial, while the 
ingenuity of his master-workmen was exerted 
toward finding a system whereby, through a 
balancing of thrusts, the sheer bulk of building 
material in any structure could be reduced 
one-half. 

They found it, and Gothic architecture was 
the result; but in the process — not of structural 

[24] 



BEGINNINGS OF GOTHIC ART 

evolution, but of that social evolution which lay- 
behind — they found and they created much else. 
Justly estimated, the eleventh is one of the most 
wonderful centuries in history; for then began, 
and with astonishing vigor, all those great move- 
ments that were to find their climax in what has 
been well called the "thirteenth, greatest of cen- 
turies." The monks of Cluny were spreading 
enlightenment and order from a thousand centers 
all over Europe. When Gerbert became pope as 
Sylvester II, the degradation of the Papacy came 
to an end, and such great pontiffs as Leo IX and 
Gregory VII assumed sovereign direction of 
Christian civilization. Heathenism and Moham- 
medanism were beaten back, the Slav and Ger- 
manic tribes (all but the Prussians) were Chris- 
tianized, and into Britain, Italy, Sicily, the 
Levant, poured the Normans, bringing with them 
order and the Catholic faith. Schools were built 
on monastic foundations in every land, the mer- 
chant guilds came into being, art was reborn, and 
at last the flame of universal fervor culminated 
in the First Crusade. 

As all architecture, and particularly Gothic 
architecture, is pre-eminently organic, so was 
the civilization that brought it into being and 
used it as its chosen mode of visible expression. 
The three centuries from iooo a.d. to 1300 a.d. 

[25] 



LECTURES ON ARCHITECTURE 

were probably the most wholesomely organized 
and the most sanely balanced and the most 
physically and spiritually stimulating that Chris- 
tian Europe has known — at least so far as France, 
England, and Germany (again omitting Prussia 
and Brandenburg, which were not even Christian- 
ized) are concerned. No one would deny the exist- 
ence of violence, ignorance, corruption ; but these 
things have always been and, if we are to judge 
from the present condition of the world, always 
will be. The point is that they were then less 
dominating, less mordant in their influence, than 
before or since, while they were largely neutral- 
ized, or at least mitigated, by other elements of 
supreme virtue and nobility that had issue in a 
society, a civil government, an art, a philosophy, 
and a religion that combined to produce a con- 
dition of life which has in history few rivals in 
the creation of fine human character. 

It would be impossible to do more at this time 
than to indicate lines of possible study, as, for 
example, the origin and development under mo- 
nastic influence of innumerable schools all over 
Europe, particularly schools of philosophy, medi- 
cine, and general culture; the growth of a spe- 
cifically Catholic philosophy, on an essentially 
Greek foundation, but wholly Christian in its 
essence and destined to a final flowering in such 

[26] 




ELY CATHEDRAL— WEST FRONT 



BEGINNINGS OF GOTHIC ART 

immortal figures as Duns Scotus, Hugh of St. 
Victor, and St. Thomas Aquinas; the appearance 
of the great merchant guilds, with the trade 
guilds to follow, and the organization of those 
landmarks in civil liberty and order, the village 
and city communes; the founding of those potent 
agencies of civilization, the military orders of 
knighthood and chivalry; the outburst of a 
creative and stimulating art that showed itself 
in music in the enrichment of the early plain- 
song, in the trouveres and troubadours; in poetry, 
in the chansons de gestes, and the Arthurian 
legends; in architecture in Pisa, Venice, San 
Miniato al Monte, Worms, Speyer, and Maintz, 
Poitiers, Le Puy, Angouleme, Aries, Toulouse, 
Vezelay, Clermont, Caen, St. Georges de Bos- 
cherville, Jumieges, Mt. St. Michel, in Canter- 
bury, Winchester, Ely, Glastonbury, Durham; 
in the stained glass of Le Mans, Poitiers, Canter- 
bury, and Chartres; in the metal work of Hil- 
desheim, the sculpture of Autun, Moissac, and 
Chartres. 

Finally, one might suggest study of some few 
of the great and splendid characters of the 
eleventh and twelfth centuries and of the causes 
that led to such an unheard-of galaxy of honor- 
able names: St. Odo, St. Bruno, Otto the Great, 
Hugh Capet, Sylvester II, Hildebrand (Pope 



LECTURES ON ARCHITECTURE 

Gregory VII), Chretien de Troyes, Innocent III, 
St. Bernard, St. Anselm, St. Norbert, St. Thomas 
a Becket, Peter the Venerable, Suger, Abelard, 
Hugo of St. Victor, William of Champeaux, 
Lothair II, Richard Coeur de Lion, Henry II, 
Philip Augustus, Fulk of Anjou, Roger of Sicily, 
Matilda of Tuscany, Eleanor of Guienne, Blanche 
of Castile. 

The great names coruscate like divine fire- 
works, and they were not isolated personalities 
in a wilderness of mediocrity or barbarism. The 
qualities they possessed in such supreme degree 
were merely intensifications of the general life in 
which they were merged. Racial and national 
self-consciousness, individual confidence and self- 
respect, industrial emancipation and develop- 
ment, all had become operative and dynamic 
influences, and the result was a sane, consistent, 
and character-building civilization that seemed 
to leave nothing for the thirteenth century. 
There was enough, however, as I shall try to 
show in my second lecture, when I propose to 
consider the development and full flowering of 
Gothic art, and though only superficially, some 
portion of the workings of the extraordinary elan 
vital that lay behind. 

In the meantime, it is well to realize the amaz- 
ing nature of the work accomplished between 

[28] 



BEGINNINGS OF GOTHIC ART 

St. Benedict and the First Crusade. It divides 
itself naturally into three parts, which may be 
called conservation, recovery, and expansion. 
For the first the monks of St. Benedict were 
responsible— and for much else besides. They, 
in their hidden monasteries that suddenly sprang 
up throughout all the West, collected and treas- 
ured the records of Latin culture, both sacred 
and profane, furnished refuges for men and 
women from the perennial blasts of destruction, 
and cherished, however dimly, the flame of 
righteousness and order, the tradition of such 
forgotten things as right and wrong. To them 
also belongs much of the credit of the second 
period of recovery, when, under the House of 
the Carolings, the world took breath again and 
set itself to build a new earth. Not much was 
accomplished perhaps — the day between the 
dawning of Charles Martel and the death of 
Louis the Pious was too short — but out of the 
dusty and mouldering monasteries came what had 
been saved from the wreck of worlds, and for a 
few years Charlemagne's court did indeed do 
much toward collating the treasure-trove and 
giving it, if not a new life, at least the poten- 
tiality for this when the time should be ripe. 

With the eleventh century this time came; the 
unspeakable horrors of the second Dark Ages — 
[29] 



LECTURES ON ARCHITECTURE 

the ninth and tenth centuries — had reached a 
point when no further fall was possible. Feu- 
dalism — which had saved some semblance of 
order in the first Dark Ages — had become a 
combination of brutal slavery and insane an- 
archy. Kingship had ceased to be operative, 
culture was unknown, misery universal, the 
Papacy a stench and a blasphemy, and even the 
Benedictines themselves had sunk into a degen- 
eracy from which there seemed no escape. 

And yet there was an escape, as always when 
the world seems at the moment of extinction: 
the year iooo marked, not the end of the world, 
but the end of an era; the new forces were 
working hiddenly, and when St. Odo founded the 
order of Cluny they came to the surface. At 
once this astonishing power became the great 
motive force in all Europe, reforming monasti- 
cism, purging the Papacy, wrenching the fangs of 
feudalism and secular control from the throat 
of the Church, restoring education, art, and cul- 
ture, while indirectly assisting in the emanci- 
pation of the laborers and merchants and making 
possible the guilds and the city communes. 

Individual self-respect, the sense of solidarity, 
and the national spirit grew apace, but perhaps 
the most potent development — potent in its 
guaranty of great centuries to follow — was the 

[30] 



BEGINNINGS OF GOTHIC ART 

opening out of religion and its wide adaptation 
to the needs and the instincts of men. During 
the patristic period, whether in the East or the 
West, the constructive work in the developing 
and fixing of dogma had been largely intellectual. 
It was concerned primarily with destroying in- 
numerable and poisonous heresies, with the fixing 
deeply of everlasting foundations. The passion- 
ate human element of St. Augustine was excep- 
tional, but the time had now come for carrying 
still farther and developing more richly the 
tendencies he represented, so making Catholic 
Christianity forever a thing that met every 
demand and hunger of the human soul. 

In the time of Charlemagne, Radbertus had 
put into definite form the full doctrine of tran- 
substantiation, with all it meant of poignant 
appeal and the sense of divine immanence. 
Attempts to establish a strictly (as it was to be 
in later years) Calvinistic doctrine of fore- 
ordination and predestination were ruthlessly 
crushed; the tender and merciful aspects of 
Christianity were emphasized (though the meth- 
ods were not always of that ilk); and sacramen- 
talism, with its many modes of approach to God, 
its simple and obvious duties and benefits, inter- 
penetrated the whole fabric of the ecclesiastical 
organism as well as that of secular society. 

m 



LECTURES ON ARCHITECTURE 

Finally, the place of the angels and saints, and 
particularly that of the Blessed Virgin, in the 
divine cosmogony, as conscious and affectionate 
friends, companions, and intercessors, was recog- 
nized and accepted as never before, with the 
result that by the beginning of the eleventh 
century religion had become, if not the most 
important thing in life, at least the most per- 
vasive and appealing, influencing all secular and 
personal affairs and giving a unity and consist- 
ency to human effort and human existence such 
as had never been known before in history in 
any similar degree. 

It was the elan vital of the Middle Ages, and 
its amazing workings were to have issue in that 
unique and consistent civilization, from the year 
noo to the year 1300, which, through its im- 
mortal artistic expression, I shall consider, though 
superficially, in my second lecture. 



[32] 



II 

THE CULMINATION OF GOTHIC 
ARCHITECTURE 

To some of those who are most deeply affected 
by the art of mediaevalism comes at times a 
questioning and a doubt. In the prose and 
metrical romances they find subtle delicacy, 
strong and sincere feeling, exquisite finish of 
workmanship; in the great Latin hymns, deep 
and poignant emotion coupled with a marvelous 
technical mastery; in the music of the Gregorian 
mode, an art of a perfection as unique as it is 
compelling; in Catholic philosophy, profound 
thought that is both analytical and constructive 
to an amazing degree; and in theology, a quite 
unparalleled mingling of keen recognition of 
human needs, of massive and logical construc- 
tiveness, of spiritual vision that transcends 
thought and lays hold of ultimate things. In 
the plastic arts they discover, as never before, 
sculpture that in beauty and in mastery of line 
and form matches only the best of Hellas, archi- 
tecture that expresses itself as the most perfect 
organism veiled in the most delicately beautiful 

[33] 



LECTURES ON ARCHITECTURE 

forms that history records, together with arts 
altogether new, as those of glass and tapestry 
and enamel, with, in every category, a handicraft 
that records no equal antecedents for eighteen 
hundred years. 

By every law of analogy, every precedent of 
history, these conditions, if they are not fictions 
of autosuggestion, should argue the existence of 
a civilization and a culture of corresponding 
nobility and, necessarily, not only equal to that 
which produced the great art of classical times, 
but superior in all essential respects to that which 
followed it, since this, confessedly, had issue in a 
theology of doubtful value, a philosophy of — 
even now — contested authority and diminishing 
credit, and a complete downfall of all the arts 
save poetry and music and, in a few instances, 
the drama. 

And against this they must set an almost 
universal, and a solemnly authoritative, asser- 
tion that behind this brilliant manifestation of 
culture and of character lay social chaos, political 
incapacity, universal warfare, cruelty, injustice, 
oppression, superstition, bigotry, Cimmerian ig- 
norance, and all those elements of barbarism 
that go to the making of what we commonly 
know as the Dark Ages. The antithesis is strik- 
ing, the paradox baffles the understanding, and 

[34] 



CULMINATION OF GOTHIC ART 

as a result, it is to be feared, some are brought 
to the sorry pass of holding that after all there 
need be no vital connection between culture and 
civilization, and that art of any and every kind, 
lofty philosophy, and a loftier religion, need not 
be held to express anything of nobility or achieve- 
ment in a nation or among a people, but may 
manifest themselves through savagery as they 
may disappear in an epoch of the highest 
development. 

Such a lamentable deduction is quite un- 
necessary; for the paralyzing antithesis is only 
apparent. It has neither reality nor even 
plausibility, and is due partly to the misleading 
and wrong-headed nature of written histories, 
partly to a commonly inadequate and equally 
wrong-headed system of education, partly to a 
mental confusion and the loss of any adequate 
standard of comparative values that are the 
result of the two first-named agencies. Tem- 
peramentally incapable of estimating history 
except in terms of military operations, dynastic 
vicissitudes, or concrete material achievements, 
the popular historians, confused in the midst 
of the apparently aimless and resultless events 
and courses of the Middle Ages in these cate- 
gories of unimportant activity, fall back on the 
conclusion that these are the full revelation of 

[35] 



LECTURES ON ARCHITECTURE 

the time, that there was nothing in it anyway; 
and they write the history of the thirteenth 
century in the terms of Hohenstaufen and Capet 
and Plantaganet, of battles and councils and 
treaties and "pragmatic sanctions," of militant 
heresies and obscurantist scholasticism, of names 
and dates and titles. Where there are few in- 
deed who write living history as Henry Adams 
writes it, or Henry Osborne Taylor, or Cardinal 
Gasquet, or John Richard Greene, or Lord 
Bryce, there are scores of the "baser sort," who 
mask their lack of vision and of comprehension 
by an erudition that almost persuades and by a 
heaping of the Pelion of genealogical records on 
the Ossa of military adventure that stuns if it 
does not enlighten. 

If you would know the Middle Ages and why 
they brought into being the thing that was 
themselves — their culture — you must needs aban- 
don the accepted historical method and consider, 
not the things that make facile textbooks, but 
those that make life and character and person- 
ality; for these were the essence of the Middle 
Ages, and they lie outside court and camp and 
council. 

There is no little significance in the widespread 
and penetrating change now affecting the atti- 
tude of men toward the comparative position of 




CHARTRES CATHEDRAL— INTERIOR 



CULMINATION OF GOTHIC ART 

the arts of the Middle Ages, and toward its 
positive quality as well. There is still greater 
significance in the new estimate of the cultural 
background of this art. Before the events of 
the last five months of the year 1914 opened 
our eyes to the shallow and meaningless nature 
of our own civilization — until then so highly 
spoken of, if one remembers correctly — there 
were many who had gone back from mediaeval 
art to its social antecedents and accompaniments, 
who had rediscovered, and in some degree re- 
estimated, its philosophy and its religion, and 
who, rejecting the statistical history and the 
superficial diagnosis of current and popular 
chronicles, had found in the years between 
1050 and 1300 a wonderland and a revelation. 
It is not to be forgotten that while the dominant 
tendencies in society were working themselves 
out, with neither let nor hindrance, to that 
logical culmination that revealed itself in the 
first week of that memorable August of the year 
of grace 1914, there was developing simultane- 
ously a tendency as different as day from night, 
and with equal swiftness and even more startling 
vigor. Scientific efficiency, which — united to 
religious infidelity and state-worship — has been 
given the name of Kultur, was paralleled by a 
very opposite thing, which has always been known 

[37] 



LECTURES ON ARCHITECTURE 

as culture, and this latter, made up of religion, 
philosophy, and art, was in its most essential 
elements based on the earlier culture, not of 
Hellenism, not of Roman imperialism, not of the 
Renaissance, not of the evolutionary philosophy 
and scientific efficiency of the nineteenth century, 
but on those very centuries from St. Bernard to 
St. Bonaventure, from Chretien de Troyes to 
Dante, from Hildebrand to St. Louis, from 
Noyon to Beauvais, that had been forgotten 
for four hundred years and maligned by 
every historian during that same space of 
time. 

Such a return, such a reaction, if you like, was 
inevitable. In my former lecture I tried to show 
something of the wonder of those crescent years 
from the close of the Dark Ages in 950 to the 
culmination of Catholic civilization three cen- 
turies later — those years that saw a new art, 
born from the ruins of a shattered past, work 
slowly through Norman and Romanesque and 
Burgundian modes toward the full flowering of 
perfected Gothic art. It is now for us to consider 
in a paragraph what justly requires many vol- 
umes — the continuation of this great era of 
growth and its intrinsic qualities that were the 
basis of the most comprehensive and inspiring 
art the world has known. 

[38] 



CULMINATION OF GOTHIC ART 

The Middle Ages form a period of notably 
high culture but of comparatively undeveloped 
civilization. That this distinction is possible is 
proved by many eras of history, and it must be 
recognized if we are correctly to understand and 
estimate this particular period. Culture is made 
up of three elements — philosophy, religion, and 
art; civilization is measured by the degree to 
which a people has diverged from barbarism in 
motives, manners, and customs. Greece was a 
center of supreme culture, but her civilization 
was of no high order; Rome was superbly civil- 
ized, but in philosophy, religion, and art she fell 
immeasurably below the Greece she had de- 
stroyed. During the Middle Ages there was 
little ground gained in the recovery of the civil- 
ization that had disappeard, together with cul- 
ture itself, during the Dark Ages. Manners at 
first were rude and direct, civil government rudi- 
mentary, industry carried on by very primitive 
methods, material efficiency almost unknown, 
and yet philosophy rose to transcendent 
heights, religion, both in theology and in 
action, was vital, commanding, loftily beautiful, 
and of a nature that endures forever, while 
art, in whatever category, rose out of the nothing- 
ness of the tenth to the dizzy heights of the 
thirteenth century, where it forms a goal of 

[39] 



LECTURES ON ARCHITECTURE 

emulation thus far unattainable by succeeding 
generations. Civilization is an excellent means 
to an end, if that end be character or culture, 
but if it is unfruitful of either, or if it produces 
only the Dead Sea fruit of Kultur, it is no more 
than the tree that bringeth forth evil fruit, and 
it is cut down and cast into the fire. Culture, 
on the other hand, does not necessarily follow 
from civilization, nor does it always have issue 
in civilization or in that human character which 
is the object of life itself. Sometimes it casts 
its glamor over very evil conditions indeed, as 
in Greece and Byzantium, just as civilization 
blinds us to equally evil conditions in the later 
Renaissance, and in the nineteenth and twentieth 
centuries, when true culture is at a lower ebb 
than at any time for six hundred years. But 
the mediaeval period was not of this nature, and 
then, whatever we may say of efficient civiliza- 
tion, the culture of philosophy, religion, and art 
did produce character of the highest, while in 
itself it finds few rivals in the preceding 
centuries or in those that have followed. 

From the twelfth century the thirteenth took 
over all the great creative theology of St. Anselm 
and St. Bernard and continued it to its logical 
conclusion through the Fourth Lateran Council. 
The pure piety and spiritual ardor of the great 

[40] 




BOURGES CATHEDRAL —NAVE 



CULMINATION OF GOTHIC ART 

founder-monks of the preceding centuries blos- 
somed into a world-wide monasticism that was 
in general the most stimulating and beneficent in- 
fluence of the epoch, and closed at last in the 
perfect charity of St. Francis and the passionate 
ardor of St. Dominic. Catholic philosophy- 
achieved its highest point in Albertus Magnus, 
Duns Scotus, Roger Bacon, St. Bonaventure, 
Raymond Lully, Alexander Hales, Hugh of St. 
Victor, and St. Thomas Aquinas. Now the 
Arthurian and Nibelungen epics take on their 
final form, the minnesingers and meistersingers 
follow the trouveres and troubadours, while Latin 
hymnology creates a new and glorious category 
of art, and Dante closes the line as the great 
synthesis, the culmination of all. Music per- 
fected its Gregorian mode and began its develop- 
ment of harmony that was later to culminate in 
the eighteenth century after the death of the 
other arts; painting came into being through 
Duccio, Cimabue, and Giotto; sculpture in 
France, and later in Italy and England, recov- 
ered the spirit and the mastery of Greece; stained 
glass revealed itself in the amazing glories of 
Chartres, Bourges, Angers, as art of the greatest, 
while all the minor crafts of metal and wood and 
textiles followed suit, and toward an unexampled 
end. 

[41] 



LECTURES ON ARCHITECTURE 

Of the architecture of this amazing time I shall 
speak immediately, since this is the long-deferred 
object of this lecture; but first let me name one 
or two out of the galaxy that prove beyond cavil 
that here indeed culture, without the highest 
efficiency of civilization, was not inconsistent 
with the production of noble character. Note 
only such names as Innocent III, Gregory IX, 
Boniface VIII; Henry III and Edward I; 
Frederick Barbarossa, Rudolph of Hapsburgh, 
Ferdinand III, Alfonso the Wise, St. Louis 
of France, Stephen Langton, Robert Grosseteste, 
Blanche of Castile, St. Clare, St. Elizabeth of 
Hungary. Everywhere, on civil and ecclesiastical 
thrones, in cloister and on crusade, in the fast- 
multiplying universities — themselves the crea- 
tion of mediaevalism — we find the most notable 
personalities, of a nature that establishes an 
undying hope for humanity and a guaranty of 
its powers of recuperation and lofty achievement. 

The development of Catholic faith and practice 
along those personal and appealing lines, to which 
I have already referred, was the mainspring of 
the new vitality, and this development showed 
itself chiefly through an increasing richness and 
intimacy in the sacramental system and in the 
cult of our Lady and the saints. The crusades, 
which synchronize with the whole epoch of me- 

[42] 



CULMINATION OF GOTHIC ART 

diaevalism, the military orders of knighthood, 
and the splendid pageant of chivalry, all acted 
as connecting links between religion and secular 
life, knitting them for a few brief centuries into 
an organic whole. Everywhere, in all lands, on 
the hills, in the sheltered valleys, beside the un- 
polluted streams, were the monasteries, each 
with its free school and sometimes with its cir- 
culating library, the guiding spirit of youth, the 
inspirer of manhood, the refuge for old age. 
Universities with throngs of students rivaling 
the most numerous of those today — Prague, 
Paris, Padua, Montpellier, Orleans, Valencia, 
Valladolid, Oxford — grew to a position of power 
we can now hardly appreciate. In almost every 
great city was a free hospital with isolation wards 
for lepers and others afflicted with contagious 
diseases. 

So far as the development of civil liberty, the 
formulating of law, and the organization of con- 
stitutional government are concerned, it is pos- 
sible to say that more was accomplished in the 
Middle Ages than during any other equal period 
in human history. The Provisions of Oxford, 
Magna Carta, Bracton's De Legibus, the Codes 
of Frederic II, the Institutes of St. Louis, the 
Golden Bull of Andrew II of Hungary, the codices 
of canon law of Gregory IX and Boniface VIII, 
[43] 



LECTURES ON ARCHITECTURE 

are the foundation stones of civil liberty and the 
basis of modern law. 

Conditions of this kind are the forcing-house 
of art; it follows instinctively, without the inter- 
vention of schools or lectureships or wealthy 
amateurs. And it is a united art, expressing 
itself, not along one line alone, but in myriad 
ways. Architecture in the thirteenth century is 
no greater than sculpture, or poetry, or music, 
or glass; it is the vehicle of all, the plexus where 
all unite with one impulse and one end. It is a 
unity as perfect as that of Hellas, but it is dif- 
ferent in its genesis and its operation; for it is a 
popular art, not the art of an elect caste; it is the 
work of free men, not of servile agents under a 
few of high attainments and high authority; and 
finally it is the expression of a personal and pas- 
sionate religion that was life itself to every artist 
and every craftsman, every noble and every 
peasant, whose possession it was in fullest meas- 
ure and without distinction of class or estate. 
It can truthfully be said that the word "Gothic" 
as applied to the plastic arts of mediaevalism is 
synonymous with the word "Catholic." 

Not that the plastic arts then, or at any time, 
are alone entitled to be called art. The thing 
itself is greater than these and includes more, 
particularly poetry in every form, with music, 

[44] 




RHEIMS CATHEDRAL— WEST FRONT 



CULMINATION OF GOTHIC ART 

drama, and ceremonial. The modern fashion of 
confining the "fine arts" to painting, sculpture, 
and architecture is evidence in itself how far we 
have fallen from the cultural ideal of the Middle 
Ages. 

Now, architecture, as I said in my first lecture, 
is primarily organism; it is also synthesis, that 
is, it cannot exist without many of the other 
arts, and when — as in the case of a Gothic 
cathedral in operation — it combines with itself 
every other mode of art, then it becomes the 
greatest art-manifestation possible to fallen man. 
Chartres or Rheims or Westminster in the four- 
teenth century during a pontifical mass was 
undoubtedly the greatest and most comprehen- 
sive work of art the mind can conceive or the 
intelligence bring into being. 

This organic quality on which I have laid so 
much stress, not only because of its essential 
importance, but also because it is the very qual- 
ity most lacking today, was determined and 
assured in the twelfth century. The thirteenth 
was devoted to perfecting this to the highest 
possible point and to infusing the result with the 
spiritual elements of beauty and of emotional 
stimulus. In this the artists of the time were 
following a natural parallelism with such other 
commanding artists as Homer, Plato, Shakes- 

[45] 



LECTURES ON ARCHITECTURE 

peare, Michelangelo, all of whom found their 
enduring glory, less through original discovery 
and creation, than through their power of gather- 
ing up all the work of their forbears and breath- 
ing into it the breath of life. 

This great work of organic development may 
be seen to perfection in the Cathedral of Our 
Lady of Paris, and it is progressive from east to 
west. The choir was begun in n 63, the west 
front completed in 1235, and in these seventy 
years all the promise of Jumieges was fulfilled in 
more than abundant measure. From east to 
west there is a steady growth in certainty of 
touch, in structural articulation and integrity, 
and in the development of the sense of pure 
beauty. The plan is of the simplest — only a 
parallelogram with one semicircular termination, 
divided into five aisles, the middle one being 
twice the width of the others, with all the load 
concentrated on points distributed with almost 
the accuracy of an engineer. The interior order 
— i.e., arcade, triforium, and clerestory — holds 
still by the somewhat dull mechanism of early 
Norman work, and the three elements are too 
nearly alike in vertical height for a result either 
beautiful or structurally significant. It lacks 
rhythm and subtlety of composition. The shaft- 
scheme of such transitional work as Noyon holds 

[46] 



CULMINATION OF GOTHIC ART 

here, with cylindrical columns in the arcade sup- 
porting multiple shafts above, the vaulting shaft 
resting directly on the capital of the arcade 
column — an inorganic device much admired by 
Gothic theorists of the nineteenth century. On 
the other hand, the little Lombard round win- 
dow has blossomed into the "Mystic Rose," 
which here approaches sublimity, and is used as 
the central feature of the terminations of nave 
and transepts. The whole nave is full of trials, 
experiments, changes, hurriedly adopted and 
half completed, and the exterior is marked by 
the same absorbing personality. In the chevet, 
for example, the mad and unbeautiful flying 
buttresses are not original; for at first the sys- 
tem was the subsequently standard type — two 
flights of arches, each properly grounded through 
pillar or wall-buttress. After a disastrous con- 
flagration, however, some genius with a daring 
disproportionate to his discretion conceived the 
idea of covering both aisles with one enormous 
span. The result never commended itself, how- 
ever, and is almost unique, but it shows at the 
same time the nemesis of structural pride that 
in the end, at Beauvais, was to close the history 
and the power over beauty of detail that was 
not mitigated by structural indiscretions; for 
the design of the buttress pinnacles of these 

[47] 



LECTURES ON ARCHITECTURE 

Brobdingnagian arches is perhaps the most 
beautiful single thing in Gothic architecture. 
As for the west front, it ever remains the great 
classical achievement of the Middle Ages, the 
most superbly conceived work of architecture 
that has ever issued from the hand of man in 
any place or at any time. It has no rival in the 
past, and none is conceivable for the future. 

Laon was more or less contemporary with 
Paris, later if anything; but it is as different as 
may be. Where Paris is calm, serene, simple, 
Laon is nervous, complex, almost fantastic. For 
Paris two vast towers were enough, for Laon 
seven could hardly suffice. The whole work is 
tentative, vacillating, romantic, and, it must be 
confessed, inferior. Only in its conception and 
composition, however; in detail it is faultless, 
and one realizes here how, whatever the vagaries 
of the master-mason, the great body of artificers 
were always on hand to redeem primary mistakes 
by their conservative and assured taste and 
sense of beauty — a condition of things that 
in a sense marks the length of road we have 
traveled since then. 

With Chartres, Bourges, and Rheims we come 
to a trinity of masterpieces that group themselves 
around the crowning years of Catholic civiliza- 
tion and are its sufficient expression and — if this 

[48] 




NOTRE DAME, PARIS (Plate X from V Art golhique en France) 



CULMINATION OF GOTHIC ART 

were needed— justification. Chartres dates in 
the main from 1194, when it was begun anew 
after a fire that destroyed all but the crypt and 
the west front, to 1260, when it was consecrated. 
In plan it is perhaps the noblest of all Gothic 
churches, while its interior, in point of organism, 
proportion, relation of parts, articulation, has 
few rivals. It is, I believe, the most perfect 
religious interior man has produced, as Paris 
is the greatest exterior, so far as its facade is 
concerned. 

Bourges was begun in the same year with 
Chartres and its essential organism then deter- 
mined, though the west bays of the nave were 
not completed until the very end of the thir- 
teenth century. Its plan is wholly different 
from those of Paris, Laon, and Chartres (for 
there was then no copying of one master-builder 
by another) and its interior organism is quite 
original. It has no transepts and therefore no 
crossing, while its arcade is twice as lofty in 
proportion as the arcades of its sister-churches. 
It is the most aspiring and romantic of all and 
in some respects is the most brilliant in its 
artistic invention. 

Rheims began to rise from its ashes in the year 
121 1, just when the savage tribes of Prussia began 
to yield to Christian missionaries— the last of the 
[49] 



LECTURES ON ARCHITECTURE 

heathen races of North Europe to accept Chris- 
tianity for a time — later to overwhelm in the 
red ruin of shell and flame the great church 
that in its building marked the moment of 
their evanescent conversion. The west front, to 
the base of the upper story of the towers, was 
finished with the close of the century. In plan, 
in exterior and interior organism, in detail, and in 
sculpture, Rheims was the perfected work of the 
Catholic civilization of the Middle Ages. Every 
other building shows here and there experiment, 
uncertainty, an almost nervous reaching out of 
its creators toward a dim ideal that was yet the 
one reality. Of this there was nothing in Rheims. 
It was the work of a master so supreme in his 
artistry that he laid hold on perfection where 
his followers struggled toward it. I am not 
sure that this perfect attainment raised it 
very far above Chartres or Bourges or Cou- 
tances. Final it was, in conception and in 
every minutest part, but to me there is some- 
thing in the tremulous daring of Bourges, in the 
unsatisfied but eager desire of Paris, in the rapt 
faith and awestruck groping for the hand of God 
in Chartres, that appeals with a poignancy that 
in Rheims yields to dumb reverence for final and 
almost superhuman achievement. After all, man 
is the creature that tries, and in the striving for 

[50] 



CULMINATION OF GOTHIC ART 

perfection we do not look for success; we resent 
it, in a sense, when one approaches it too closely. 
The great churches of the thirteenth century- 
tried, as man tries, to achieve the unattainable, 
and in their failure they are sublime. One 
achieved, or almost achieved — Rheims — and, 
while we gave it the tribute of awed veneration, 
our hearts went first to the more human monu- 
ments of men, rather than of demigods. Rheims 
almost achieved the unattainable; its martyrdom 
has completed what its makers just failed of 
attaining, and for the future in the hearts of 
this and every succeeding generation, in saecula 
saeculorum, it will stand first in mind and in heart 
as the perfect work of man when he wrought in 
the fear of God. 

Ten years after the beginning of Rheims the 
first stones were laid of Amiens, which progressed 
slowly through the century, the west towers 
being finished in the last quarter of the four- 
teenth century. Wonderful as the church is, 
with its perfectly developed chevet and dizzy 
nave, its exquisite carvings, and its masterly 
sculptures, it is the first evidence of the swerving 
of the thirteenth-century builders toward self- 
confident science and away from a purer artistic 
impulse. It is too competent, too perfect in its 
balancing of thrusts, in its concentration of loads, 

[51] 



LECTURES ON ARCHITECTURE 

in the sumptuous decorations of its west front. 
It is true that it suffers bitterly from lack of the 
glass that glorifies Chartres and Bourges, and 
once was the crown of Rheims, but even this 
could not quite have blinded one to the conscious- 
ness that constructive intelligence was beginning 
to take the place of aspiration and inspiration, 
of joy in design and mastery of workmanship, 
of the divine ardor that lifted the tall arches of 
Bourges and made of the porches of Chartres 
and of the doors of Rheims masterpieces equaled 
only, if at all, on the Athenian Acropolis. 

The choir of Le Mans is contemporary with 
Amiens and has the same merits and the same 
defects, at once the most ingenious and highly 
articulated in its chevet construction, and 
touched everywhere with the too perfect accom- 
plishment of the structural engineer. Ten years 
after Amiens the choir of Beauvais was begun, 
and this was finished, with the crossing and spire, 
in 1274. Man already had accomplished more 
than he could rightly claim for his own. Here he 
tried for still more and failed; for twelve years 
later the spire and vault, which had been raised 
higher than Amiens and on more slender sup- 
ports, fell in ruins, and though the choir was later 
rebuilt, with added reinforcements, the crossing 
tower was never reconstructed. The tran- 

[52] 




LAOX CATHEDRAL— WEST FRONT 



CULMINATION OF GOTHIC ART 

septs were built in the fifteenth century, and 
beautiful as they are, it is the beauty of the artist 
in ornament, not of the creator of an almost 
living organism, such as Chartres or Rheims. 

With the close of the thirteenth century all 
the great work had been accomplished in France, 
where it had begun two centuries before. In 
the end man strove to attain by reason what is 
granted only to faith and prayer, and, as always 
happens in such circumstances, disaster followed 
close. After this only two things were possible: 
the freezing of tradition into that cold mastery 
that produced such correct and imposing monu- 
ments as St. Ouen and Cologne, or the wandering 
off into the wilderness of exuberant fancy and 
lawless fantasticism from which emerged the 
sumptuous front of Rouen and the impossible 
jewel-work of Brou. 

I have taken a few churches from France alone 
to use as examples of the perfection of Catholic 
art. Of course the result is partial only, but it 
is impossible to concentrate in an hour the 
products of the two greatest centuries in history 
and to give some hints as well of the vital 
impulse that brought them into existence. One 
cannot know Gothic art as a whole without 
full regard for its manifestations in Great 
Britain — or Spain, or Flanders, or the upper 

[53] 



LECTURES ON ARCHITECTURE 

Rhine, for that matter — for this art was one; 
it reached from the Mediterranean to the 
Firth of Forth, and from the Danube to the 
Atlantic. There is no justification for those 
who see in it only certain new and con- 
summate structural inventions and devices and 
so try to confine the name to masonry struc- 
tures covered by ribbed and pointed vaults, or 
to those where the system of balanced thrusts 
is perfectly adhered to. Gothic is a spirit, as 
well as a mode — more than a mode — the spirit 
of a triumphant and universal Catholic culture; 
and you can make of it no less, as you cannot 
make of it more. 

In Great Britain this culture was peculiarly 
deep and compelling, and its art therefore is of 
the noblest order, from Glastonbury through the 
whole wonderful sequence of Salisbury, West- 
minster, Lincoln, York Abbey, Guisborough, 
Gloucester, and the chapel of Henry VII, where 
it ends at last as French Gothic ended in Rouen 
and the transepts of Beauvais. In France the 
work was episcopal, communal, and secular; in 
England it was largely — and the best of it — 
monastic, which gives it a quality all its own and 
invaluable in its record of the nature and the 
influence of this greatest of mediaeval agencies 
for the spreading of culture and civilization. In 

[54] 



CULMINATION OF GOTHIC ART 

France, again, the triumphant work is that of the 
vast communal cathedrals; in England it is not 
only of the almost equally vast abbeys, it is 
even more especially of the myriad little parish 
churches which developed a character and a 
personality peculiar to themselves, equaled no- 
where else, and as perfect in their way as the 
overwhelming glory and majesty of Bourges or 
Notre Dame. 

France and England are the two great centers 
of mediaeval art expression, and France and 
England were the two countries where mediaeval 
culture reached its point of perfect development. 
In almost every other part of Europe we find, 
however, Gothic architecture, and in certain 
directions, as in painting, greater results than 
were achieved among Franks and Anglo-Saxons. 
There is a very noble early Gothic in Spain, and 
there also, and in Flanders, Italy, and the Rhine- 
land, an art of later mediaevalism that is ex- 
quisitely beautiful in its combination of delicacy 
and opulent fancy. In every case it is tinged 
with a strong and vital nationalism, differen- 
tiating itself from the art of every other land, 
yet invariably true in essentials and in spirit to 
the great unity that, in spite of minor wars and 
rivalries, bound Europe together as never before 
or since. 

[55] 



LECTURES OX ARCHITECTURE 

From the beginning of the fourteenth century 
signs of decline showed themselves in architec- 
ture, but in all the other arts the advance was 
almost feverish in its intensity, particularly in 
poetry and painting and letters; and even in the 
failing architecture the loss was recorded rather 
in the great cathedrals and churches than in the 
minor productions of castles and civic halls and 
dwellings. Until a few months ago eastern 
France and Belgium were glorious with the 
splendid works of a culture still dominant in the 
fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, though now 
they are embers and ashes, after having been 
granted immunity by the contending armies of 
three centuries. 

And this art continued in all its manifold 
phases until the Reformation, when, the impulse 
that had lasted for fifteen generations being 
withdrawn, it ceased almost in a day, and, 
except in music and poetry — and spasmodically 
in painting — has never been restored, though five 
other centuries have passed, clamorous for art, 
insistent in its practice, ignorant of how it was 
to be attained. 

If we look for the secret of this strange and 
compelling art, we find it (as I have tried to show) 
in the unique culture of the time, which was the 
result of a triumphant and universally accepted 

[56] 



•^ jaPv'^Af-- 


jPlSl -111 

Si i 15 


- 


■-'■'I' 


* 1 


'£::. - J 



BEAUVA1S CATHEDRAL SOUTH TRANSEPT 



CULMINATION OF GOTHIC ART 

religious faith, a philosophy that supplemented 
instead of denying it, a just estimate of com- 
parative values (strikingly unlike our own), 
and an industrial and economic system that 
may have lacked the earmarks of what we are 
pleased to call civilization, but produced fruits 
of character which the latter sometimes fails to 
reveal. 

There was, we must always remember, but 
one faith and one Church, and these were not, 
as now, divided into an hundred inimical camps 
and accepted as accessories to a dominating life 
constituted on lines essentially antagonistic. 
Religion was the prime consideration, the one 
great reality, the personal possession of every 
man, and the Church was the concrete fact that 
made religion operative. Everywhere was a 
perfectly organized monasticism, more perva- 
sive even than the secular priesthood, and every 
monastery was a center of culture, of education, 
and of order. With a very remarkable com- 
munal spirit went equal individuality, liberty, 
and independence. Capitalism was unknown, 
labor controlled its own destinies as it never has 
succeeded in doing since, and the guild system 
produced a condition of industrial vigor and 
efficiency that guaranteed a great measure of 
justice. 

[57] 



LECTURES ON ARCHITECTURE 

It would be impossible to exaggerate the im- 
portance of the guild system in connection with 
the quality of the work produced. The Greek 
workmen were slaves under a group of highly 
specialized experts; the Romans, slaves also, 
subject to the orders of a superior type of freed- 
men who were employed by their masters as 
we employ milliners and decorators; the me- 
diaeval artificers were free citizens strengthened 
by co-operative association, and each man was 
in himself an artist, granted the independence 
of action due to such, and working under a power- 
fully fostered impulse of emulation that is the 
particular bete noire of the trade unions of today. 
There was no such thing as an architect, superior 
and supreme. An architect, as we count him 
today, is a sign of inferior culture, necessary but 
regrettable. There were master-workmen then, 
but each was simply primus inter pares ', inspiring 
and co-ordinating, but leaving to his fellows 
their just share in invention and their free field 
for creative effort and aesthetic expression. 

Behind the vitalizing power of religion and the 
stimulus of free expression lay certain immemo- 
rial traditions that undoubtedly reached back 
through the mysterious Comacini, with their 
traditions of symbolism and of mystic significa- 
tion in numbers and forms and their relations, 

[58] 



CULMINATION OF GOTHIC ART 

together with those that controlled the variations, 
irregularities, and refinements in the plan and in 
the vertical elements of a building. This whole 
question of symbolism and structural refine- 
ments is as baffling as it is fascinating. There 
is no longer room for questioning the existence 
of these things, and we owe much to the persis- 
tent investigations of Professor Goodyear, which 
have finally demonstrated the premeditated 
quality of the universal irregularities that reveal 
themselves in all the best of the buildings of the 
Middle Ages. The rationale of this strange 
subtlety is still to be found, but the thing itself 
is there, and it possibly reaches back through 
different races and nationalities at least to the 
time of the building of the Temple in Jerusalem, 
and it is as certainly one of the great elements 
in the perfect beauty of mediaeval work. 

To this ancient and almost prehistoric form 
of tradition was added all the peculiar quality 
that grew out of the religion of Christianity, 
and while we need not accept the mystical and 
exaggerated theories of Huysmans, we must 
admit that there is in all mediaeval work a great 
mystery of symbolism and structural refinement, 
of which we ourselves know nothing; for with 
the coming in of capitalism after the close of 
the Middle Ages, the workman and craftsman 

[59] 



LECTURES ON ARCHITECTURE 

became slaves again, the secrets all were lost, the 
sequence of tradition destroyed, and we are now 
left naked to the tender mercies of the architect, 
the general contractor, and unionized labor. 

I have already spoken of the contributory 
part played by all the other arts in the great 
result, of the revitalized old arts of sculpture 
and painting and music, of the new arts, such as 
stained glass. In point of fact, it is wrong to use 
the word "contributory"; for it was not a case 
of many arts united to one end, it was rather 
one art) as one and indivisible as the Catholic 
religion and the Catholic Church, expressing 
itself in many ways and through different types 
of artists. With the Renaissance this unity was 
broken, art split up into as many followings as 
there were theological heresies during the Ref- 
ormation, and no steps have been taken toward 
restoring that unity again. Art today is in the 
condition of Germany after the break-up of the 
Empire, a hundred little piffling states, none 
knowing where it was or what it existed for, and 
with no co-ordination and no sense of unity. As 
there, at times, through the whim of fate, some 
margrave or grand duke or elector was born 
greater than his kind, who gave for a moment a 
sudden splendor to his little state, so now, in 
any one of the arts, may arise, and does arise, a 
[60] 



CULMINATION OF GOTHIC ART 

genius who spreads a temporary glory on his 
little art, as Wagner or Browning or Richardson 
or St. Gaudens or Sargent; but each passes, and 
his art returns again to its normal level of 
mediocrity and general aimlessness. 

Is there any possibility of recovery, of the 
finding again of the great aim that restores the 
vitalizing spirit, that unites art once more with 
many methods but one end ? The art we have 
been considering gives the answer, the conditions 
now existing for half a year the opportunity. 
Civilization, our civilization, without culture and 
without any adequate sense of comparative 
values, has broken down in universal and cata- 
clysmic war. It is no war of wilful kings or 
conscienceless diplomatists; it is no war without 
excuse and without reason for existence. Inevit- 
able, unescapable, it involves the world with the 
grim fatalism that brought the universal Empire 
of Rome to its most timely end. When the cul- 
ture of the Middle Ages was overwhelmed by the 
civilization of the Renaissance, certain tendencies 
were initiated that were bound to work them- 
selves out to their logical conclusion. They have 
done so, and the perfect climax reveals itself 
in that region of Europe, and under the di- 
rection of that people, which last of all sur- 
rendered its heathenism to Christianity, but too 
[61] 



LECTURES ON ARCHITECTURE 

late to acquire the everlasting benefits of the 
Middle Ages. On all the nations of the earth 
has come a great fear, for they see now what 
they themselves have made, and the evil and 
dark wrong it has produced. This is the great 
war between civilization and culture, between — 
as has been said — Corsica and Galilee, between 
the triumphant Renaissance-Reformation and 
a recrudescent mediaevalism. 

Where the victory will rest is no question for 
argument; the answer is foreordained. Already 
the great and efficient system of modern civiliza- 
tion has over-passed its term and it must yield 
to something older and better, to that opposing 
culture which is the everlasting enemy of Kultur, 
a culture made up of that religion which is true 
because it is revealed by God, that philosophy 
which supplements religion instead of denying it 
and adapts its spiritual and mystical content to 
the limited and finite human intelligence, that 
art which is the harmonizing of both and their 
perfect and divinely ordained expression. 

The new-found art of mediaevalism has re- 
vealed to the world the possibilities and the 
significance of art at its highest; it has led us 
back to the discovery of the comprehensive, 
stimulating, and character-building culture be- 
hind it. Through these things we can gain an 
[62] 



CULMINATION OF GOTHIC ART 

answer to the appalling question forced on us by 
the Great War, seeing now the true nature of the 
civilization that could have issue in such a thing 
as this, realizing where, in spite of official "pa- 
pers" of whatever color, right rests, and wrong, 
and finally realizing the lines on which, once the 
purging of the world is over, the new era must 
be built if the beneficent and regenerating cul- 
ture of true religion, sound philosophy, and vital 
art is to return to a wasted but repentant and 
regenerate world. 

The study of mediaeval art and mediaeval 
culture is not, at this time, a trivial playing with 
archaeology. It is the finding of the answer to 
the great question propounded by a world at war. 



[63] 



PRINCIPLES OF ARCHITECTURAL 

COMPOSITION 

and 

MODERN ARCHITECTURE 

BY 

THOMAS HASTINGS 



Ill 

PRINCIPLES OF ARCHITECTURAL 
COMPOSITION 

Composition is not a subject for systematic 
analysis. We may learn about it in the lecture- 
room and by reading books, but in this way we 
can never acquire the art of composing. As in 
the case of the painter or sculptor, the architect 
must be apprenticed. Mere work never made 
an artist; a great work was never produced 
without great working. A man can never be a 
great artist without great industry. The extraor- 
dinary amount of work done, and well done, 
by the great masters in art — work which has 
survived — is incomprehensible to the modern 
artist. A man may think that he must wait for 
a so-called inspiration; but the real artist will 
find something to do for every hour and leave 
inspiration to take care of itself. Inspiration 
will come oftener, and with greater power, when 
the artist works without waiting for it. 

Let us undertake less and work more. The 

mere direction of a number of draughtsmen to 

do our work for us is not art. As soon as the 

architect gives up the T-square and triangle and 

[67] 



LECTURES ON ARCHITECTURE 

only directs others, he no longer advances, but 
retrogrades by this method of trying to manu- 
facture architectural designs. Nor is it honest 
for an architect to pretend to be the author of 
work that others are doing for him, any more 
than it would be for a painter, a sculptor, or a 
writer to take credit for work he has not done. 

There are many principles upon which the 
architect works and many laws which guide him 
in his study which it would be impossible to 
formulate, because he knows them intuitively. 
There are many vital things in the art of composi- 
tion, just as there are in our everyday life, which 
are none the less true because we know them by 
intuition. The fact that we cannot formulate 
these things does not make them in any sense 
the less real. It is also just as true that there 
are many things in art which can be learned 
only by instruction and in which it will not do 
to trust to intuition. A proper instruction in 
these things will quicken and develop the 
intuition. 

The most difficult thing in composition (and I 
believe this to be true of all art) is to know how 
to be simple, but to be simple without being 
stupid and colorless; to be firm and strong with- 
out being hard and angular; to have good detail, 
which, on the one hand, does not assert itself to 
[68] 



ARCHITECTURAL COMPOSITION 

the injury of the ensemble, and, on the other 
hand, is not timid for fear of a want of refine- 
ment. When a man has acquired a certain 
knowledge of his art, timidity is almost as bad 
as vulgarity and weakness as unpardonable as 
coarseness. 

The highest logic in art is truth. It is neither 
logical nor true to have a great auditorium or 
principal room running through three or four 
stories of a building without some indication of 
it in the facade. If you are anxious to introduce 
into a composition a tower, a dome, or even an 
insignificant feature where the practical condi- 
tions imposed upon you will not allow you to 
expose such a motive in plan, do not build the 
motive, but do something else rather than resort 
to deceit or constructive trickery. If we only 
knew how to compose, the more variety offered us 
in the conditions imposed the more interesting 
would it be to look for the artistic solution of the 
problem. It is right to be logical; but a work of 
art was never beautiful solely because logical. 
There is no one who does more harm than the 
mere purist who worships what he thinks logic, 
but what is only prejudice, while he is blind to 
the fact that he is admiring and encouraging 
falsehood and vice in art and trampling truth 
under foot. 

[6 9 ] 



LECTURES ON ARCHITECTURE 

The more fertile the imagination of the com- 
poser the more carefully should he train his 
judgment, so that he will know what does not 
look well in his own work with as much facility 
and readiness as he would know what does not 
look well in the work of those associated with 
him. He must be his own impartial judge. A 
bad idea suppressed is a triumph for the good. 

There seem to be two mistaken tendencies in 
our American methods of architectural education. 
The one class of men with whom we have to 
contend includes those who would dispense with 
the triangle, compass, and T-square, and with 
such familiarity with the orders and the prin- 
ciples of composition as will enable the student 
to use them with the utmost facility. They 
neglect these things, forsooth, to make room for 
what they call clever sketching. These men seem 
to have a peculiar disdain for the legitimate 
means of study, as though they were inartistic. 
The other class of men includes the pretended 
"savants" who would learn their profession as 
though a good knowledge of the history and 
literature of their art, with a course of general 
lectures, were all-sufficient, if followed by a few 
years of practical office experience. 

To these so-called "savants," or the men who 
would teach architecture only in scientific or 

[70] 




GIRALDA TOWER AND CATHEDRAL, SEVILLE 



ARCHITECTURAL COMPOSITION 

literary ways, it should be said that architecture 
is an art rather than a science, and that when 
the architect is most skilled in his art he has 
least need of recourse to science. Of course, an 
architect must be familiar with descriptive 
mathematics for the purpose of calculating the 
intersection of vaults and roof, and for various 
problems in stereoptomy; but if the floor-plan 
has been well studied from an artistic or aesthetic 
point of view, there will rarely be left other diffi- 
cult engineering and mathematical problems for 
the architect to solve. Here is the key to the 
entire problem. 

All good composition begins with the thorough 
study of the plan. Few seem to realize that the 
floor-plan is anything more than a mere matter 
of the convenient arrangement of the several 
parts of the building. A good floor-plan, as seen 
on paper, has proportion, form, scale, color, 
values, and character; or it may be clumsy and 
inelegant. It determines the relation to each 
other of two of the three dimensions in space. 
It involves and determines the entire composi- 
tion; the silhouette or outline of the whole 
structure is really projected on the plane of this 
drawing. 

Not only does the silhouette or outline of the 
elevation in every sense depend upon the plan, 

[7i] 



LECTURES ON ARCHITECTURE 

but the best kind of perspective of it is here im- 
plied, because we can see therein the position and 
relative size of the different parts. When the 
plan is well studied, then it constructs well, 
builds well, and we need very little of analytical 
mathematics to assist us in our construction. 

Until modern times, how much mathematics 
besides geometry and the descriptives did archi- 
tects know, as compared with what we are given 
to learn, and what did they know of the strength 
of materials ? With them it was mostly a ques- 
tion of good judgment with a proper and uncom- 
mon understanding of constructive principles and 
of stereoptomy, and the other descriptive mathe- 
matics. Analytical mathematics is comparatively 
a modern science. While there existed graphical 
rules for the approximate determination of the 
thrusts from arches as early as the thirteenth 
century, yet it practically is only in the past 
fifty years that the correct principles of construc- 
tive analysis have been fully developed; and 
there is still room for improvement in this 
direction. Until recently architects probably 
never calculated the strength of their materials 
or the thrust of arches and vaults. With them 
it was a question of intelligence, and not of 
ingenuity. It was the qualitative rather than 
the quantitative principles of construction that 

[72] 



ARCHITECTURAL COMPOSITION 

they studied, and these were always based upon 
experiment or experience. It was by knowing 
how to avoid difficult problems, with art in the 
floor-plan, that they escaped having difficult 
analytical problems to solve. We must always 
give precedence to practice before laws and 
theories. 

If you were to show me a well-studied plan 
for the first time, I should not hesitate to say 
because of its beautiful proportions and the 
ability of its design that there is absolutely no 
necessity of calculating the thrusts of the arches 
and the strength of materials, excepting for the 
purpose of verification. In a well-studied floor- 
plan there will almost always be artistic reasons 
for making a pier economical in size and strong 
enough to support the weight that it has to 
carry. By pure mathematics we can determine 
only approximately what should be the size of a 
pier. The strength of materials must be esti- 
mated. We select at random several specimens 
of the stone to be used in our building. We 
obtain crucial tests for this purpose, and so we 
are supposed to learn from these few specimens 
the average weight per cubic inch which the 
stone will support. This we call our coefficient 
of strength in the stone chosen for our building. 
Taking into account the fact that the quarry 

[73] 



LECTURES ON ARCHITECTURE 

where the stone is obtained may have a great 
fissure running through it, or may have other 
imperfections, the mathematician enters upon 
his calculations to learn how large a pier built 
of this stone should be to support the weight 
that is to be above it. After this the architect 
practically admits the inexactitude of his prem- 
ises by increasing two or more times the size of 
the pier, and calls this the factor of safety or 
ignorance. I believe in such calculations for 
purposes of verification, but, in general, the piers 
will be about as safe to build upon when studied 
by an educated architect as when calculated by 
engineers. 

It is really architecture and well-proportioned 
masonry versus engineering and iron girders. 
Each has its use, but they are not interchange- 
able. Buildings have stood for centuries which 
were constructed without a knowledge of modern 
engineering, solely because their plans as seen on 
paper were so well studied, so thoroughly artistic 
and beautiful, that constructive difficulties were 
avoided. 

Now that photographs and illustrated books 
are so accessible to the student, copying or 
adaptation is a greater temptation than ever 
before. We compile more than we compose; 
but if our plan is first thoroughly studied to 

[74] 



ARCHITECTURAL COMPOSITION 

meet the practical requirements of the problem 
in hand, then when interpreting this plan and 
designing the facade we can neither copy nor 
adapt. Copying destroys progress in art and all 
spontaneity. y/^ 

So long as a great many inartistic buildings 
are put up, the mathematical verification is 
needed for the protection of human life. Of 
course, there is one most unfortunate condition 
imposed upon us in these days, under which 
condition the plan has but a very small part to 
play in the solution of the problem — the so-called 
skyscraper. Here all would agree that expert 
mathematicians and engineers should be called 
in consultation, just as they are called in for 
questions of steam heating, ventilation, or elec- 
trical work. But even here great economy might 
obtain if with art the plan is so subdivided as 
to permit of a good distribution of weights and 
as much repetition as possible in the lengths of 
steel beams and girders. In monumental archi- 
tecture the thicknesses of walls and piers should 
be proportionately related to the spans of the 
arches or to the distances and floor spaces. The 
thickness of a column should be proportioned to the 
intercolumniation, or distance between columns. 

Do not misunderstand me. I would not dis- 
parage the thorough study of the plan from a 

[75] 



LECTURES ON ARCHITECTURE 

utilitarian point of view. This is, in fact, the ' 
principal channel through which our life and 
habits can influence our composition and style. 
Before beginning to study the general composi- 
tion of the floor-plan, it is first necessary to 
reduce the problem to its simplest form from a 
utilitarian point of view, taking into account 
the number of the principal rooms or divisions 
and the use to which they are to be put, their 
sizes, and the most reasonable form that should 
be given them. This is, as it were, the theorem 
or the program of the composition. If the ques- 
tion of disposition is not thus thoroughly under- 
stood at first, it will arrest the freedom of the 
mind and the imagination. 

When a plan has been well studied, then in 
developing the exterior or interior few changes 
will be needed, even in details. In the further 
development of the scheme we need only fill our 
minds and hearts with the spirit, the ideas, and 
the sentiments of our age, and study to interpret 
the plan, in order to reach the best results. 

Of equal importance is the question of the 
position or site of the building and the principal 
points from which it will be seen. Certain dis- 
tributions of the several parts of the building 
that would be well for a low and flat country 
would be inappropriate for a hill. The streets, 

[76] 




CATHEDRAL AND GIRALDA TOWER, SEVILLE 



ARCHITECTURAL COMPOSITION 

promenades, or squares, or possibly water — 
river, lake, or sea — should of necessity have a 
great influence upon this distribution. The 
architect should know how to dispose his masses 
and should calculate upon the different effects 
with these conditions of environment taken into 
account. The plan which does not satisfy all 
such given conditions is not only impracticable, 
but must in consequence thereof be absolutely 
inartistic; for a good building must have obvious 
adaptation, both to its uses and to its environ- 
ment. A plan has what we call good circulation 
when it is so arranged or composed that there 
is direct and easy communication between its 
different parts. 

In general, it may be said that there are three 
kinds of floor-plans: the regular, the irregular, 
and the picturesque. A monumental floor-plan 
is almost always regular, unless the peculiarities 
of the site, or requirements, make this impos- 
sible. The regularity consists in the plan's hav- 
ing one principal axe. The irregular plan is an 
adaptation to the imperatives of an irregular 
site. It secures as much symmetry in the ar- 
rangement of its parts and proportions as the 
limitations of the site permit. The picturesque 
plan is not merely eccentric or lawless, but it 
is an attempt to conform to the picturesque 

[77] 



LECTURES ON ARCHITECTURE 

conditions of the environment — at the same time 
preserving as much of symmetry in its details as 
such adaptation will allow. 

For the sake of contrast the length of one 
room is ofttimes at right angles to the length of 
another room. This law of contrast is dominant 
in all art, and nowhere is the recognition of this 
law more important than in the design of a floor- 
plan. In general, the distribution of the rooms 
and the relation they bear to each other, also 
the thickness of the walls and the way they 
compose with each other, must give an interesting 
interior and exterior. 

An architect delights in the study of a great 
plan — St. Peter's, for example. The original 
conception of this plan was Bramante's. With 
many elements of greatness, his design looked 
weak and proved to be weak. After his death 
there were thirty-three years of misfortune and 
accidents, though Guiliano di San Gallo, Vignola, 
Peruzzi, and others did some good work in try- 
ing to modify and improve Bramante's design^-" 
Then Michelangelo began by destroying the 
greater part of what had been done and gave 
us most of the plan as we now see it: namely, 
that part which directly supports and encom- 
passes the dome. About one hundred years 
after Bramante's death Maderno added to 

[78] 



ARCHITECTURAL COMPOSITION 

Michelangelo's work, which was in the form of a 
Greek cross, extending the nave and changing 
the plan to the form of the Latin cross. This 
addition is inferior to all the rest of the work. 
To this part of the building belongs the present 
facade, which is not worthy of the rest of the 
structure. It was a most unfortunate thing for i 
Maderno that his work should be handed down 
to posterity between that of Michelangelo and 
that of Bernini, who planned the splendid colon- 
nade and galleries in the front of the building. 
Without further reference to its history, looking 
at the plan as a whole, we all feel that it is a 
great building. This plan as an original work is 
one of the greatest ever conceived by the genius 
of man. Study the colonnade and galleries. 
The direction of the Vatican stairs, or the Scala 
Regia, on the right side of the church, is not at 
right angles to the facade. Bernini skilfully 
planned the straight portion of the galleries in 
axe with these stairs, and then, in order to sym- 
metrize, he made the other gallery to correspond 
with it. It was of more importance to preserve 
the axes and symmetry than to have parallel 
lines. This arrangement not only made a more 
interesting silhouette, but it also made a better 
and more agreeable junction between the circu- 
lar portion of the colonnade and the straight 

[79] 



LECTURES ON ARCHITECTURE 

galleries. The forms of the piers at the two 
junctions are skilfully arranged, and they are 
charmingly repeated at the centers and extremi- 
ties of the circular colonnade. 

Again, think of the great Roman plans, the 
basilicas transformed into churches, the great 
Gothic cathedrals, and, in modern times, the 
Paris Opera House, the plan of which, without 
thought of the elevations, is the making of the 
building. 

Having considered the plans of buildings, we 
might speak briefly of the plan of the immediate 
surroundings. We have a very characteristic 
name for this portion of the composition. We 
call it the "sauce of the architecture." It is 
this portion of the design which unites or marries 
the building with its natural surroundings or the 
landscape. Most of the same principles of com- 
position obtain in the planning of this portion of 
the work as in the planning of the building itself. 
The architect should always have control of the 
design or plan of the immediate surroundings of 
his building. 

If the site will allow it, the building should be 
so placed as to have the greater portion of the 
grounds on one side of it. This is very desirable, 
especially when the site is small in proportion 
to the size of the building. The object is to give 

[80] 



ARCHITECTURAL COMPOSITION 

a large and open space at least on one side, 
instead of a small frame or fringe all the way 
around the building. 

It would seem as if this were merely common- 
sense, and yet how little is the principle recog- 
nized! How dreary are the suburban homes of 
the poorer classes in this country! It is mainly 
because a man, when he builds, places his small 
square house in the center of a square lot with a 
square walk around the house and a fence that 
forms a square around the walk; and, as if 
this were not enough, even the streets all form 
squares outside his lot. 

While the landscape or surroundings should 
govern the general composition of the building 
in the beginning, the building should in turn, 
when completed, influence and govern the ar- 
rangement and composition of that portion of 
the landscape work which comes in immediate 
contact with it. This landscape work is to sur- 
round and to support the building, serving both 
as frame and as pedestal. The immediate 
accessories of the architecture, such as the ter- 
races, balustrades, paths, fountains, or open 
spaces and vistas which come nearest the build- 
ing, are really a part of the building itself. 

While speaking of composition in plan, some- 
thing should be said with reference to the general 
[81] 



LECTURES ON ARCHITECTURE 

plan of cities, that is, the laying out of streets, 
avenues, or parks. 

The plan of a city is rather an evolution than 
the work of an architect, and so gives precious 
testimony to the different phases of the life of 
the people. Many of the most interesting sou- 
venirs of the past are seen in the general dis- 
position of the streets and public squares. How 
much art, however, may be displayed in the 
influence of this evolution can be seen by look- 
ing at some of the cities of modern times. The 
greater portion of every city is the accumulated 
work of generation after generation. This devel- 
opment is determined by local circumstances, 
by the political constitution, and by the com- 
mercial and domestic life of the inhabitants. 
But happy is the city whose development in the 
cutting of new avenues and the building of new 
squares and parks has been governed or guided 
by men of thorough architectural training. 

In this country, I feel that with the many 
good intentions in the appointment of federal 
commissions for the planning of the future 
development of cities, we architects have almost 
always undertaken too much and have been too 
ambitious in our planning. Such plans generally 
defeat themselves, and, alas, ofttimes frighten 
intelligent laymen. I know of several instances 
[82] 



ARCHITECTURAL COMPOSITION 

where work has been either entirely abandoned 
or engineers have been employed and the archi- 
tects disregarded. This is a great economic as 
well as practical mistake. 

The plan, once determined and well studied, 
should suggest all it will in elevation and deter- 
mine, in a way, all its component parts. Too 
much emphasis cannot be given to the thorough 
knowledge and understanding of the classic 
orders, especially the Roman orders — the foun- 
dations of all modern architecture since the 
Renaissance. In applying these classic orders 
to composition, we must remember that restraint 
is not bondage; it makes perfect freedom and 
progress possible, while slavish bondage ends 
every good work. Restraint does not destroy, 
but promotes, originality, guiding and stimu- 
lating it and opening the only safe paths which 
lead to usefulness and success. 

In our American enthusiasm for Greek archi- 
tecture we have too often lost sight of the 
greatness and nobility of the Roman school. 
The Greeks have never been surpassed in exqui- 
site beauty of form and proportion, in extreme 
and subtle simplicity and refinement, or in the 
perfect harmony which pervades their every 
structure. They established the alphabet and 
rhetoric of all the true architecture which has 

[S3] 



LECTURES ON ARCHITECTURE 

come into the world since their time. It seems 
to me that most of their work was the outcome 
of each generation being content to improve the 
general composition bequeathed by the genera- 
tion preceding, so as to make the temple, theater, 
or choragic monument a little better than ever 
before, thus coming so much nearer to perfection. 
When Ictinus built the Parthenon, we might 
almost say that the general composition was 
bequeathed to him. I would not for a moment 
say that it did not require just as high an order 
of genius to take the general composition which 
had been handed down and to make the Par- 
thenon perhaps the most perfect and most intel- 
lectual monument ever built as it required to 
compose and originate the great dome of the 
Pantheon with scarcely a precedent leading up 
to it. This too was a great artistic achievement, 
perhaps never surpassed in the further develop- 
ment of domes. As if this were not sufficient 
in itself, it was probably the first great structure 
of this form on so large a scale that was ever 
built; and, in fact, the Romans and Etruscans 
were practically the originators of this mode of 
construction. 

The Roman architect worked with independ- 
ence and a singular self-sufficiency as a composer. 
His personality came to the foreground as he 

[8 4 ] 



ARCHITECTURAL COMPOSITION 

used this Greek alphabet and rhetoric to broaden 
out his work in more elaborate composition. 
Such buildings as the Baths of Caracalla, one 
of the finest plans ever made, the Pantheon, the 
Colosseum, the Basilica of Constantine, the sev- 
eral triumphal arches, and many other buildings, 
are not only great, but original, conceptions. 
What a splendid development the Romans made 
of the arch, both as a rational and a beautiful 
mode of construction! They were certainly not 
an imitative people. They did so much to make 
architecture meet more varied conditions of life 
that this brings them nearer to the still more 
varied conditions of today. Bramante, San Galo, 
Michelangelo, Paladio, Vignola, however, and all 
the great architects of the Renaissance, in every 
country, designed with the Roman orders for 
their classic standards. 

There may not be a column or entablature in 
a building, but as long as there is a molding, a 
cornice, a window-sill, or an architrave, the 
architect will show in his work that he knows 
his orders and is familiar with their proportions 
and details. 

Repetition is a governing principle. We Amer- 
icans too often lose sight of this law for fear of 
being monotonous. A certain amount of monot- 
ony is a good thing, if we can get it in the right 

[85] 



LECTURES ON ARCHITECTURE 

place and in the right way. What is there more 
beautiful and more impressive than a row of 
trees on either side of a straight country road! 
On the other hand, variety is another principle. 
It should always be characterized by order and 
symmetry and should be subservient to the 
ensemble of the composition. 

Contrast in architecture is the bringing to- 
gether of the two qualities or forms that are in 
opposition to each other, such as: simple wall 
surfaces with rich carving, light with shadow, a 
perpendicular line in contrast with a horizontal, 
a high story with a low story, a large opening 
with a small opening, a high and narrow opening 
with a broad and low opening. Contrast gives 
composition warmth and color; it is one of the 
salient characteristics of the Spanish Renais- 
sance, and it is oftentimes found there in excess. 
Probably this is due to the influence of national 
character and climate. 

The proper use of materials is to keep a true 
harmony between the design and the material 
in which it is to be executed, remembering that 
stone has to be cut; iron forged or molded; 
wood sawed, planed, or carved; while terra- 
cotta has to be modeled, molded, and baked. 
It would be useless for me to discuss how design 
must take into account the character of the 
[86] 



ARCHITECTURAL COMPOSITION 

materials to be used in construction. All of us 
know that a wooden column must be lighter 
than a stone one and an iron column much 
smaller than either, with sharper and more clean- 
cut moldings, all its members being drawn out 
longer and thinner. (These are the things that 
it is best not to theorize about too much, but to 
learn by practice.) 

Perhaps the most important part of composi- 
tion remains to be considered — namely, propor- 
tion and scale. In architecture, proportion is 
the mutual relation of the dimensions of the 
several parts of a building. For example, if an 
arch looks well, it is because there is a proper 
relation between its height and width. Good 
proportions practically depend upon a refined 
sense of what looks well and of what is in the 
highest sense harmonious with the purpose of 
the building. Vitruvius, Albert, and others have 
given certain systems of geometrical formulas to 
assist the architect in verifying or determining 
proportions, both in plan and in elevation. I 
believe that comparatively few artists have 
strictly adhered to any of them or have even 
taken many of them into serious account. There 
are certain principles of proportion which all 
must regard, but these principles cannot be 
reduced to formulas. The dimensions of a 

[87] 



LECTURES ON ARCHITECTURE 

principal room or court which is not square or 
round — i.e., when it is a parallelogram — are 
ofttimes either double the width or equal 
to the diagonal of the square of the smaller 
side. 

I believe that as a rule these geometrical 
formulas would hinder rather than help the 
imagination. There are certain relations that 
should exist between the diameter and the height 
of a column or between the height of a column 
and of the entablature and its intercolumniations. 
Again, such simple rules as that the height of an 
opening might be twice its width or that, under 
other circumstances, the height should be equal 
to the diagonal of the square of the smaller side, 
as in determining the proper proportions of an 
important room — such simple rules as these, 
modified according to circumstances, have al- 
ways been accepted. The relation of one part 
of a building to another practically constitutes 
almost all that is beautiful in architecture. The 
relation of a column to the arch or wall in con- 
tact with it, whether over it, under it, or at one 
side of it, the relation of one story to another, 
of window openings to wall surfaces — these are 
all things, when we have new problems to solve, 
which, if they cannot be determined by the study 
of precedents, must be determined by that feeling 
[88] 



ARCHITECTURAL COMPOSITION 

and artistic judgment which come only with 
practice. 

Men have become accustomed to seeing things 
done in a certain way, and, while this way can- 
not be formulated and is sometimes vague, we 
must conform to it wherever we can under our 
conditions. There is therefore a kind of unwrit- 
ten law of proportion which only helps the archi- 
tect and by which he need be limited no more 
than the painter or sculptor is limited in repre- 
senting forms of nature. We are accustomed to 
seeing the human figure with certain proportions, 
and when we find in a drawing that these propor- 
tions are violated it shocks our sensibilities, not 
so much because such a deformity would not meet 
the conditions of existence, but because we are 
not accustomed to such proportions. The more 
the architect draws from both architecture and 
nature, the more quickened will his sensibilities 
be to distinguish what is good from what is bad. 
Conditions change or vary the proportions mate- 
rially: for example, a column which has to sup- 
port several stories must be heavier than one 
which is only decorative or which is on the upper 
floor, while a difference of materials would also 
require a change of the proportions. It is well 
known that a column which looks well with a 
wall behind it would look thin if it were to stand 

[89] 



LECTURES ON ARCHITECTURE 

out against a clear sky. Thus a monument in 
the form of a single column surmounted by a 
statue is generally only six or seven of its diam- 
eters in height. Notwithstanding these varia- 
tions, to meet exceptional conditions the true 
artist endeavors to keep a certain judicious equi- 
librium among all such variations. Much has 
been written about the necessity of altering the 
proportions of things which perspective fore- 
shortens, or which are hidden in part by pro- 
jecting cornices, or which will be seen from 
different points of view, in order to meet these dif- 
ferent conditions. I believe that too much has 
been said upon this subject, and that, while 
there should be some accommodation to different 
conditions, there are not nearly so many required 
as one would think. An important thing to 
remember is that when any such accommodation 
is made, or when conditions are in any way taken 
into account, the final drawing of the elevation 
with the shadows cast must in every case have 
good proportions and look well. 

A proof that a building which looks well in 
plan and elevation is almost sure to look well in 
execution or perspective is the fact that when 
we examine the measured elevations of great 
historical buildings, as given us in architectural 
books, we never see any distortion of any kind 

[ 9 o] 



ARCHITECTURAL COMPOSITION 

to remedy the effects of foreshortening, or any 
details increased in size so as to be out of pro- 
portion in the drawing because they are to be 
seen at a great height. 

In general, the passer-by divines what pro- 
jections conceal, because the shadows cast make 
him unconsciously estimate these projections. 
The mind works instinctively in making allow- 
ance for distances, just as we imagine the size 
of a ship or of a man seen in the distance. Thus 
the judgment rectifies illusions. Most of the 
exceptions are cases where a building has several 
surfaces in different planes, one surface coming 
behind another — for example, a tower rising be- 
hind a roof. Though the tower may need lifting 
to be seen, it would be a great risk to lift it so 
much that it does not look well in elevation. 
There must be an intelligent disposition of 
things and a proper method of carving or 
modeling the details according to the height 
for which they are intended rather than a 
changing of proportions or an enlargement of 
the ornament. 

Closely allied to this question of proportion 
is what is known among architects as scale. 
This is one of the most subtle and indescribable 
things in all art. Proportion and scale are dif- 
ferent things, though closely related. Proportion 

[91] 



LECTURES ON ARCHITECTURE 

is the relation between the different parts of a 
composition; scale is the relation between the 
size of all these parts and an imaginary unit of 
measure which is determined by our sense of the 
fitness of things. This imaginary unit is fixed 
by our education, observation, and associations. 
To illustrate: we associate with a horse and a 
dog two different sizes. We might imagine a 
dog the size of a horse, and yet well proportioned; 
but he would be out of scale. One part of another 
animal might be out of proportion with the rest 
and yet not be out of scale; but one part out of 
scale would of necessity be out of proportion, if 
all the rest of the parts were not in scale with it. 
A horse's head may be ill formed, yet it may 
not be out of proportion; but if it is too large or 
too small, then it is out of scale and out of 
proportion also. 

Experience and association demand a certain 
accord between the size of an object and its 
form. There is an intuitive demand in the 
minds of all men that the size of any object, 
though varying under different conditions, must 
correspond with the unchangeable things that 
surround it. The merit of a design should be 
such that it would not be consistent to increase 
or diminish any portion of the building, or even 
any detail. 

[92] 



ARCHITECTURAL COMPOSITION 

The human figure is for the architect the unit 
of measure, because its normal or average size 
is most fixed upon his mind and because it was 
by man and for man that everything in archi- 
tecture was originally conceived and developed. 
The height of a balustrade was for him to lean 
upon or to protect him; the size of a door for 
him to go through with comfort; the size of a 
building stone was for him to handle with con- 
venience and reasonable facility; the size of a 
step was for him to mount. We might say 
approximately that in ordinary circumstances 
the balustrade should be about three feet high, 
the door not less than eight, the building stone 
from twelve to sixteen inches thick, the step six 
inches rise and twelve inches tread. Now, when 
these measurements meet the practical require- 
ments they are right, not only from a utilitarian 
point of view, but also from an artistic point of 
view, and we speak of them as being in good 
scale or in scale with the rest of the building. 
The actual size in feet and inches of other things, 
such as columns, pediments, windows, cornices, 
arches, corbels, molding, ornaments, architraves, 
etc., has not been fixed by utility. The architect 
has acquired, by experience and association, a 
sense which determines the size as well as the 
proportions of these things, in order to make 

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LECTURES ON ARCHITECTURE 

them appear in his building as they really 
are, without having to compare them with 
the size of a man standing by, for a unit of 
measure. 

With the variation of the size of the building 
up to a given point, the number of parts or 
motives in the building itself need not necessarily 
change, but the relations that these parts have 
to each other and their respective proportions 
must change. To illustrate this principle: the 
normal man is larger than the dwarf, or the horse 
than the pony, but while in both instances the 
same features exist in each, their proportions are 
so different that in a photograph or an accurate 
drawing we can always distinguish the normal 
man from the dwarf or the horse from the pony. 
This is because in all four cases the characteristic 
features are in scale. This we feel either instinc- 
tively or by observation. 

Now take an architectural example. There 
are certain buildings which do not look their 
real size. Instead of being impressed with the 
immensity of a building, we are surprised to find 
how small a man looks when we see him standing 
near it. That is because, while the proportions 
may be, in general, good, the building lacks scale. 
It could almost be said that it might be reduced 
to one-half its size, and without some definite 

[94] 



ARCHITECTURAL COMPOSITION 

unit of measure to compare it with we should 
scarcely notice the reduction. 

In building, all things are good in scale when 
they seem as large as they are. Bigness, for the 
sake of bigness, is small art. Often a small 
thing looks bigger than some big thing which 
looks small. If we err one way or the other, it 
is better to make a thing somewhat large in scale. 
Yet things that are large in feet and inches may 
be architecturally small. This entire question of 
scale is too often neglected and should always be 
given thought and careful study. Before begin- 
ning to work, it is well to sketch a man at one 
side of the paper, drawing him at the scale 
to be adopted. This is for comparison and 
guidance. 

A large window and a large door look well if 
not exaggerated. A large arch or a large column 
in scale is imposing; if not in scale, it is ugly, 
and its bigness only emphasizes its ugliness. In 
general, when the size of a motive increases — as, 
for example, in a cornice — the number of its 
minor parts, such as moldings, should increase, 
though by no means proportionately with the 
increase of the cornice. 

In our study, in order to understand fully the 
true conditions of things and the real proportions 
and the scale of our building, we should always 

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LECTURES ON ARCHITECTURE 

blacken-in the walls of our plan, and draw and 
color-in the shadows of our facades and sections; 
otherwise we can never judge how the building 
will look in execution. This way of rendering 
drawings reveals the true proportions and con- 
ditions of things, while a perspective drawing 
distorts and misleads. 

Though it is not universally the case, we can 
generally detect either one, two, or three clearly 
marked divisions in the height of a well-composed 
building. There is, as it were, a beginning, a 
middle, and an end in this vertical growth. 
Possibly this comes from the fact that nature 
itself seems to favor this triple division. We 
see it in space — length, breadth, and height; in 
time — past, present, and future; in the kingdoms 
— mineral, vegetable, and animal. We have 
always seen the triune in the aspirations and 
longings of men in ancient mythologies and 
religions, and in Christianity itself in its idea of 
the Trinity. There is a common tendency in 
writing to run one's adjectives in triads, for ex- 
ample: "He was honest, courteous, and brave" 
— a tendency which was very marked in 
Dr. Johnson. Dr. Holmes thinks that this 
comes of an instinctive and involuntary effort 
of the mind to present a thought or image with 
the three dimensions that belong to every solid, 

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ARCHITECTURAL COMPOSITION 

an unconscious handling of an idea as if it had 
length, breadth, and thickness. 

We have so few well-composed buildings in 
the short history of American architecture that 
we have a right to expect from those who govern 
us such patriotism as will hold fast to the best 
as well as the time-honored landmarks of our 
national civilization. The historic monuments 
of a people may be regarded as the features of 
its countenance, through which is revealed the 
soul of that people. They should show respect 
for age. Our country has too few of these ex- 
pressive lines of experience in its youthful his- 
toric countenance, and should have the soul to 
respect and save every one of them. It is per- 
haps not strange if, in the mad excitement of 
rebellion or revolution, men's passions lead them 
to destroy the very best of their own inheritance; 
but in times of peace, with calm and quiet delib- 
eration to destroy the ancient landmarks which 
our forefathers have set for us — this seems utterly 
irreverent and inexcusable. 



by] 



IV 
MODERN ARCHITECTURE 

We American architects are ofttimes con- 
fronted with the question why we have not an 
architecture of our own — one which is essentially 
American; and why it is that so many of us who 
have studied in Paris seem inclined to inculcate 
the principles of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts into 
our American architecture. The majority of 
people do not seem to realize that in solving the 
problems of modern life the essential is not so 
much to be national, or American, as it is to be 
modern, and of our own period. 

The question of supreme interest is: What 
influence has life in its different phases upon the 
development of architectural style ? Style in 
architecture is that method of expression in the 
art which has varied in different periods, almost 
simultaneously throughout the civilized world, 
without reference to the different countries, be- 
yond slight differences of national character, 
mostly influenced by climate and temperament. 

Surely modern architecture should not be the 
deplorable creation of the would-be style in- 

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MODERN ARCHITECTURE 

ventors, the socialists who have penetrated the 
world of art farther than they have the world of 
politics, who are more concerned in promulgating 
an innovation than in establishing a real improve- 
ment—so-called Futurists, New Thinkers, Cu- 
bists, art nouveau followers, all unrelated to the 
past without thought of traditions. No more 
should modern architecture be the work of the 
illogical architect, living in one age and choosing 
a style from another, without rhyme or reason, 
to suit his own fancy or that of his client. 

The important and indisputable fact is not 
generally realized that from prehistoric times 
until now each age has built in one, and only 
one, style. Since the mound-builders and cave- 
dwellers, no people, until modern times, ever 
attempted to adapt a style of a past epoch to 
the solution of a modern problem. In such 
attempts is the root of all modern evils. In each 
successive style there has always been a distinc- 
tive spirit of contemporaneous life from which 
its root drew nourishment. But in our time, 
contrary to all historic precedents, there is this 
confusing selection from the past. Why should 
we not be modern and have one characteristic 
style expressing the spirit of our own life ? His- 
tory and the law of development alike demand 
that we build as we live. 

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LECTURES ON ARCHITECTURE 

One might consider the history and develop- 
ment of costumes to illustrate the principle 
involved. In our dress today we are modern, 
but sufficiently related to the past — which we 
realize when we look upon the portraits of our 
ancestors of only a generation ago. We should 
not think of dressing as they did, or of wearing 
a Gothic robe or a Roman toga; but, as indi- 
vidual as we might wish to be, we should still 
be inclined, with good taste, to dress according 
to the dictates of the day. 

The irrational idiosyncrasy of modern times 
is the assumption that each kind of problem 
demands a particular style of architecture. 
Through prejudice, this assumption has become 
so fixed that it is common to assume that if 
building a church or a university we must make 
it Gothic; if a theater, we must make it Renais- 
sance. One man wants an Elizabethan house, 
another wants his house early Italian. With 
this state of things, it would seem as though the 
serious study of character were no longer neces- 
sary. Expression in architecture, forsooth, is 
only a question of selecting the right style. 

The two classes with which we must contend 

are, on the one hand, those who would break 

with the past, and, on the other, those who would 

select from the past according to their own fancy. 

[i oo] 



MODERN ARCHITECTURE 

Style in its growth has always been governed 
by the universal and eternal law of development. 
If from the early times, when painting, sculpture, 
and architecture were closely combined, we trace 
their progress through their gradual development 
and consequent differentiation, we cannot fail to 
be impressed by the way in which one style has 
been evolved from another. This evolution has 
always kept pace with the progress of the po- 
litical, religious, and economic spirit of each 
successive age. It has manifested itself uncon- 
sciously in the architect's designs, under the 
imperatives of new practical problems, and of 
new requirements and conditions imposed upon 
him. This continuity in the history of architec- 
ture is universal. As in nature the types and 
species of life have kept pace with the successive 
modifications of lands and seas and other physical 
conditions imposed upon them, so has architec- 
tural style in its growth and development until 
now kept pace with the successive modifications 
of civilization. For the principles of develop- 
ment should be as dominant in art as they are 
in nature. The laws of natural selection and 
of the survival of the fittest have shaped the 
history of architectural style just as truly as 
they have the different successive forms of life. 
Hence the necessity that we keep and cultivate 
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LECTURES ON ARCHITECTURE 

the historic spirit, that we respect our his- 
toric position and relations, and that we realize 
more and more in our designs the fresh demands 
of our time, more important even than the 
demands of our environment. 

What determining change have we had in the 
spirit and methods of life since the revival of 
learning and the Reformation to justify us in 
abandoning the Renaissance or in reviving 
mediaeval art — Romanesque, Gothic, Byzantine, 
or any other style ? Only the most radical 
changes in the history of civilization, such as, 
for example, the dawn of the Christian era and 
of the Reformation and the revival of learning, 
have brought with them correspondingly radical 
changes in architectural style. 

Were it necessary, we could trace two dis- 
tinctly parallel lines, one the history of civiliza- 
tion and the other the history of style in art. 
In each case we should find a gradual develop- 
ment, a quick succession of events, a revival, 
perhaps almost a revolution and a consequent 
reaction, always together, like cause and effect, 
showing that architecture and life must corre- 
spond. In order to build a living architecture, 
we must build as we live. 

Compare the Roman orders with the Greek 
and with previous work. When Rome was at 
[102] 



MODERN ARCHITECTURE 

its zenith in civilization, the life of the people 
demanded of the architect that he should not 
only build temples, theaters, and tombs, but 
baths, basilicas, triumphal arches, commemo- 
rative pillars, aqueducts, and bridges. As each 
of these new problems came to the architect, it 
was simply a new demand from the new life of 
the people, a new work to be done. When the 
Roman architect was given such varied work to 
do, there was no reason for his casting aside all 
precedent. While original in conception, he was 
called upon to meet these exigencies only with 
modifications of the old forms. These modifica- 
tions very gradually gave us Roman architecture. 
The Roman orders distinctly show themselves 
to be a growth from the Greek orders, but the 
variations were such as were necessary so that 
the orders might be used with more freedom in 
a wider range of problems. These orders were 
to be brought in contact with wall or arch, or to 
be superimposed upon one another, as in a Roman 
amphitheater. The Roman recognition of the 
arch as a rational and beautiful form of con- 
struction, and the necessity for the more intri- 
cate and elaborate floor-plan, were among 
the causes which developed the style of the 
Greeks into what is now recognized as Roman 
architecture. 

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LECTURES ON ARCHITECTURE 

We could multiply illustrations without limit. 
The battlements and machicolated cornices of 
the Romanesque, the thick walls and the small 
windows placed high above the floor, tell us of 
an age when every man's house was indeed his 
castle, his fortress, and his stronghold. The 
style was then an expression of that feverish 
and morbid aspiration peculiar to mediaeval life. 
The results are great, but they are the outcome 
of a disordered social status not like our own, 
and such a status could in nowise be satisfied 
with the simple classic forms of modern times, 
the architrave and the column. 

Compare a workman of today building a 
Gothic church, slavishly following his detail 
drawings, with a workman of the fourteenth 
century doing such detail work as was directed 
by the architect, but with as much interest, 
freedom, and devotion in making a small capital 
as the architect had in the entire structure. 
Perhaps doing penance for his sins, he praised 
God with every chisel-stroke. His life interest 
was in that small capital; for him work was 
worship; and his life was one continuous psalm 
of praise. The details of the capital, while beau- 
tiful, might have been grotesque, but there was 
honest life in them. To imitate such a capital 
today, without that life, would be affectation. 
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MODERN ARCHITECTURE 

Now a Gothic church is built by laborers whose 
one interest is to increase their wages and dimin- 
ish their working hours. The best Gothic work 
has been done and cannot be repeated. When 
attempted, it will always lack that kind of medi- 
aeval spirit of devotion which is the life of 
mediaeval architecture. 

We might enumerate such illustrations in- 
definitely. 

If one age looks at things differently from 
another age, it must express things differently. 
We are still living today in the period of the 
Renaissance. With the revival of learning, with 
the new conceptions of philosophy and religion, 
with the great discoveries and inventions, with 
the altered political systems, with the fall of the 
Eastern Empire, with the birth of modern science 
and literature, and with other manifold changes 
all over Europe, came the dawn of the modern 
world; and with this modern world there was 
evolved what we should now recognize as the 
modern architecture, the Renaissance, which 
pervaded all the arts and which has since en- 
grossed the thought and labor of the first masters 
in art. This Renaissance is a distinctive style 
in itself, which, with natural variations of char- 
acter, has been evolving for almost four hundred 
years. 

[105] 



LECTURES ON ARCHITECTURE 

So great were the changes in thought and life 
during the Renaissance period that the forms of 
architecture which had prevailed for a thousand 
years were inadequate to the needs of the new 
civilization, to its demands for greater refinement 
of thought, for larger truthfulness to nature, for 
less mystery in form of expression, and for 
greater convenience in practical living. Out of 
these necessities of the times the Renaissance 
style was evolved — taking about three genera- 
tions to make the transition — and around no 
other style have been accumulated such vast 
stores of knowledge and experience under the 
lead of the great masters of Europe. Therefore 
whatever we now build, whether church or dwel- 
ling, the law of historic development requires 
that it be Renaissance, and if we encourage the 
true principles of composition it will involun- 
tarily be a modern Renaissance, and with a view 
to continuity we should take the eighteenth 
century as our starting-point, because here 
practically ended the historic progression and 
entered the modern confusion. 

Imagine the anachronism of trying to satisfy 
our comparatively realistic tastes with Gothic 
architectural sculpture or with paintings made by 
modern artists! Never, until the present gen- 
eration, have architects presumed to choose from 
[106] 




TOURS CATHEDRAL 



MODERN ARCHITECTURE 

the past any style in the hope of doing as well as 
was done in the time to which that style belonged. 
In other times they would not even restore or 
add to a historic building in the style in which 
it was first conceived. It is interesting to notice 
how the architect was even able to complete a 
tower or add an arcade or extend a building, 
following the general lines of the original com- 
position without following its style, so that 
almost every historic building within its own 
walls tells the story of its long life. How much 
more interesting alike to the historian and the 
artist are these results! 

In every case where the mediaeval style has 
been attempted in modern times the result has 
shown a want of life and spirit, simply because 
it was an anachronism. The result has always 
been dull, lifeless, and uninteresting. It is with- 
out sympathy with the present or a germ of 
hope for the future — only the skeleton of what 
once was. We should study and develop the 
Renaissance and adapt it to our modern condi- 
tions and wants, so that future generations can 
see that it has truly interpreted our life. We 
can interest those who come after us only as we 
thus accept our true historic position and de- 
velop what has come to us. We must accept 
and respect the traditions of our fathers and 

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LECTURES ON ARCHITECTURE 

grandfathers and be, as it were, apprenticed by 
their influence. Without this we shall be only 
copyists, or be making poor adaptations of what 
was never really ours. 

The time must come — and, I believe, in the 
near future — when architects of necessity will be 
educated in one style, and that will be the style 
of their own time. They will be so familiar 
with what will have become a settled con- 
viction and so loyal to it that the entire 
question of style, which at present seems to be 
determined by fashion, fancy, or ignorance, will 
be kept subservient to the great principles of com- 
position which are now more or less smothered 
in the general confusion. 

Whoever demands of an architect a style not 
in keeping with the spirit of his time is responsible 
for retarding the normal progress of the art. We 
must have a language if we would talk. If there 
be no common language for a people, there can 
be no communication of ideas, either architectural 
or literary. I am convinced that the multiplicity 
of printed books and periodicals written by liter- 
ary critics and essayists who have not even been 
apprenticed but are writing with authority about 
art, has, perhaps, been more instrumental than 
anything else in bringing about this modern con- 
fusion. I believe that we shall one day rejoice 
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MODERN ARCHITECTURE 

in the dawn of a modern Renaissance, and, as 
always has been the case, we shall be guided by 
the fundamental principles of the classic. It will 
be a modern Renaissance, because it will be 
characterized by the conditions of modern life. 
It will be the work of the Renaissance architect 
solving new problems, adapting his art to an 
honest and natural treatment of new materials 
and of new conditions. Will he not also be un- 
consciously influenced by the twentieth-century 
spirit of economy and by the application of his 
art to all modern industries and speculations ? 

Only when we come to recognize our true 
historic position and the principles of continuity 
in history, when we allow the spirit of our life 
to be the spirit of our style, recognizing, first of 
all, that form and all design are the natural and 
legitimate outcome of the nature or purpose of 
the object to be made — only then can we hope 
to find a real style everywhere asserting itself. 
Then we shall see that consistency of style which 
has existed in all times until the present genera- 
tion; then, too, shall we find it in every per- 
formance of man's industry, in the work of the 
artist or the artisan, from the smallest and most 
insignificant jewel or book-cover to the noblest 
monument of human invention or creation, 
from the most ordinary kitchen utensil to the 
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LECTURES ON ARCHITECTURE 

richest and most costly furniture or painted 
decoration. 

We must all work and wait patiently for the 
day to come when we shall work in unison with 
our time. Our Renaissance must not be merely 
archaeological — the literal following of certain 
periods of the style. To build a French Louis XII 
or Francis I or Louis XIV house, or to make an 
Italian cinquecento design, is indisputably not 
modern architecture. No architect until our 
times slavishly followed the characteristics of 
any particular period, but he used all that he 
could get from what preceded him, solving such 
new problems as were the imperatives of his 
position. 

What did a man like Pierre Lescot, the archi- 
tect of the Henry II Court of the Louvre, en- 
deavor to do ? It would have been impossible 
for him actually to define the style of his own 
period. That is for us, his successors, to do. 
For him the question was how to meet the new 
demands of contemporaneous life. He studied 
all that he could find in classic and Renaissance 
precedents applicable to his problem. He com- 
posed, never copying, and always with that 
artistic sense of the fitness of things which was 
capable of realizing what would be harmonious 
in his work. In the same way all architects, at 

rnoi 



MODERN ARCHITECTURE 

all times, contributed to a contemporaneous 
architecture, invariably with modifications to 
meet new conditions. This must be done with 
a scholarly appreciation of that harmonious re- 
sult which comes only from a thorough educa- 
tion. So, with freedom of the imagination and 
unity of design, an architecture is secured 
expressive of its time. 

Again, as in all times until now, there will be 
design and not mere novelty in the carriage, 
automobile, or boat, as well as in the endless 
variety of implements of utility or amusement. 

How is it with us in modern times ? Not only 
do many architects slavishly follow the character 
of some selected period, but they also deliber- 
ately take entire motives of composition from 
other times and other places to patch and apply 
them to our new conditions and new life. Every 
man's conscience must speak for itself as to 
whether such plagiarism is right; but while the 
moral aspect of this question has very little to 
do with art, yet intellectually such imitative 
work, though seemingly successful, positively 
stifles originality, imagination, and every effort 
to advance in the right direction. 

The way is now prepared for us to endeavor 
to indicate what are some of the principal causes 
of the modern confusion in style. With us 
[in] 



LECTURES ON ARCHITECTURE 

Americans an excessive anxiety to be original is 
one of the causes of no end of evil. The imagina- 
tion should be kept under control by given prin- 
ciples. We must have ability to discern what is 
good among our own creations and courage to 
reject what is bad. Originality is a spontaneous 
effort to do work in the simplest and most natural 
way. The conditions are never twice alike; each 
case is new. We must begin our study with the 
floor-plan and then interpret that floor-plan in the 
elevation, using forms, details, and sometimes 
motives, with natural variations and improve- 
ments on what has gone before. The true artist 
leaves his temperament and individuality to take 
care of themselves. 

Some say that if this is all that we are doing 
there is nothing new in art; but if we compose 
in the right way .there can be nothing that is 
not new. Surely you would not condemn nature 
for not being original because there is a certain 
similarity between the claw of a bird and the 
foot of a dog, or between the wing of a bird and 
the fin of a fish. The ensemble of each creature 
is the natural result of successive stages of life, 
with variations of the different parts according 
to the principles of evolution. There are count- 
less structural correspondences in the skeletons 
of organic life, but these show the wonderful 

[H2] 




CHURCH OF ST. ETIENNE DU MONT, PARIS 



MODERN ARCHITECTURE 

unity of the universe; and yet, notwithstanding 
this unity, nature is flooded with an infinite 
variety of forms and species of life. 

We must logically interpret the practical con- 
ditions before us, no matter what they are. No 
work to be done is ever so arbitrary in its prac- 
tical demands but that the art is elastic and 
broad enough to give these demands thorough 
satisfaction in more than a score of different 
ways. If only the artist will accept such prac- 
tical imperatives as are reasonable, if only 
he will welcome them, one and all, as friendly 
opportunities for loyal and honest expression 
in his architecture, he will find that these very 
conditions will do more than all else besides 
for his real progress and for the development of 
contemporaneous art in composition. 

Never resent what at first thought may seem 
to be limitations and in despair try to change 
conditions which, if reasonable, should suggest 
new and interesting design. Frederick the Great 
said: "The great art of policy is not to swim 
against the stream, but to turn all events to 
one's own profit. It consists rather in deriving 
advantage from favorable conjunctures than in 
preparing such conjunctures." And when told 
of the death of the Emperor Charles VI, he said 
to a friend who was with him: "I give you a 

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LECTURES ON ARCHITECTURE 

problem to solve: When you have the advantage, 
are you to use it or not ?" 

The architects in the early history of America 
were distinctly modern and closely related in 
their work to their contemporaries in Europe. 
They seem not only to have inherited traditions 
but religiously to have adhered to them. I 
believe that it is because of this that the genuine 
and naive character of their work, which was of 
its period, still has a charm for us which cannot 
be imitated. McComb, Bulfinch, Thornton, 
Letrobe, L'Enfant, Andrew Hamilton, Strick- 
land, and Walters were sufficiently American 
and distinctly modern, working in the right 
direction, unquestionably influenced by the Eng- 
lish architecture of Indigo Jones, Sir Christopher 
Wrenn, James Gibbs, Sir William Chambers, and 
others. Upjohn and Renwick, men of talent, 
were misled, alas, by the confusion of their times, 
the beginning of this modern chaos, the so-called 
Victorian-Gothic period. 

Gifted as Richardson was, and great as was 
his personality, his work is always easily distin- 
guished, because of its excellent quality, from the 
so-called Romanesque of his followers. But I 
fear the good he did was largely undone because 
of the bad influence of his work upon his pro- 
fession. Stumpy columns, squat arches, and 

[114] 



MODERN ARCHITECTURE 

rounded corners, without Richardson, form a 
disease from which we are only just recovering. 
McComb and Bulfinch would probably have 
frowned upon Hunt for attempting to graft the 
transitional Loire architecture of the fifteenth 
century upon American soil, and I believe that 
all will agree that the principal good he accom- 
plished was due to the great distinction of his 
art and to the moral character of the man himself 
rather than to the general influence and direction 
of his work. 

Whether we agree with Charles F. McKim or 
not in wanting to revive in the nineteenth cen- 
tury the Italian Renaissance of the sixteenth 
century, the art of Bramante, St. Galo, and 
Peruzzi, he had perhaps more of the true sense 
of beauty than any of his predecessors in Ameri- 
can art. His work was always refined, individual, 
and had a distinctly more classic tendency in 
his most recent buildings. 

We have seen that the life of an epoch makes 
its impress upon its architecture. It is equally 
true that the architecture of a people helps to 
form and model its character, in this way react- 
ing upon it. If there be beauty in the plans of 
our cities and in the buildings which adorn our 
public squares and highways, its influence will 
make itself felt upon every passer-by. Beauty 

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LECTURES ON ARCHITECTURE 

in our buildings is an open book of involuntary- 
education and refinement, and it uplifts and 
ennobles human character. It is a song and a 
sermon without words. It inculcates in a people 
a true sense of dignity, a sense of reverence and 
respect for tradition, and it makes an atmos- 
phere in its environment which breeds the proper 
kind of contentment, that kind of contentment 
which stimulates true ambition. If we would 
be modern, we must realize that beauty of de- 
sign and line in construction build well, and with 
greater economy and endurance than construc- 
tion which is mere engineering. The qualitative 
side of a construction should first be considered, 
then the quantitative side. The practical and 
the artistic are inseparable. There is beauty in 
nature because all nature is a practical problem 
well solved. The truly educated architect will 
never sacrifice the practical side of his problem. 
The greatest economic as well as architectural 
calamities have been performed by so-called 
practical men with an experience mostly bad and 
with no education. 

It is, I believe, a law of the universe that the 
forms of life which are fittest to survive — nay, 
the very universe itself — are beautiful in form 
and color. Natural selection is beautifully ex- 
pressed, ugliness and deformity are synonymous; 
[116] 



MODERN ARCHITECTURE 

and so it is in the economy of life — what would 
survive must be beautifully expressed. 

Has the world beheld in art that which we 
call style, changing with each age, the visible 
expression of man's inner consciousness, appear- 
ing above the horizon with the dawn of civiliza- 
tion, gradually developing in orderly sequence, 
one degree upon another, following the course of 
time ? Has all this come into existence only to 
disappear again on the other side of the small 
circle of its horizon ? Has history recorded its 
progress from dawn to twilight, unconscious of 
its rapid fading into the darkness of night ? Or 
will it rise again, following the natural laws of 
the universe ? Or, like the falling star, is it lost 
in the confusion of eternal space, never to appear 
again ? 

As each age tells its own story in its own lan- 
guage, shall we tell our story to future genera- 
tions in our own way ? A great tide of historic 
information has constantly flowed through the 
channel of monuments erected by successive 
civilizations, the art of each age being an open 
book recording the life and spirit of the epoch, 
ofttimes verifying the truth of its own literature, 
an integral part of the whole scheme of evidence. 
The archaeologist thus supplements the historian, 
but alas, with the chain divided, the future will 

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LECTURES ON ARCHITECTURE 

have drifted away from the past into a vast 
ocean of discord, where architectural continuity 
will have ceased to exist. 

The recently discovered buried cities of Assyria 
give us a vivid idea of the civilization lost 
to history. The Pyramid of Cheops and the 
temples of Karnak and Luxor tell us more of 
that ingenuity which we cannot fathom and 
of the grandeur and life of the Egyptian 
people than the scattered and withered docu- 
ments or fragments of inscriptions that have 
chanced to survive the crumbling influences of 
time. 

The Parthenon and the Erectheum bespeak 
the intellectual refinement of the Greeks as much 
as their epic poems or their philosophy. The 
triumphal arches, the aqueducts, the Pantheon, 
and the basilicas of Rome tell us more of the 
great constructive genius of the early republic 
and the empire of the Caesars than the frag- 
mentary and contradictory annals of wars and 
political intrigues. The unsurpassed and inspir- 
ing beauty of the Gothic cathedrals which 
bewilder us, and the cloisters which enchant us, 
impress on our minds a living picture of the 
feverish and morbid aspirations of mediaeval 
times, a civilization that must have had mingled 
with its mysticism an intellectual and spiritual 

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APSE OF CHURCH OF ST. PIERRE, CAEN 



MODERN ARCHITECTURE 

grandeur which the so-called Dark Ages of the 
historian have failed adequately to record; and 
in America, even amid the all-absorbing work of 
constructing a new government, our people 
found time to speak to us of today in the silent 
language of their simple colonial architecture 
of the temperament and character of our fore- 
fathers. 

And when in the tumult of this modern war- 
fare men's passions overcome their reason, and 
the great monuments of history that have sur- 
vived the ages are subjected to the onslaught of 
modern armament, let us hope that they may not 
be further subjected to the work of the architect 
who would fain restore them in the style which 
has passed and so rob us of all that is left. 
Let them be protected by every device from 
further destruction, to tell the story of this 
twentieth-century civilization, this vaunted 
culture which has failed to respect and protect 
its heritage. 

Will our monuments of today adequately re- 
cord the splendid achievements of our contem- 
poraneous life, the spirit of modern justice and 
liberty, the progress of modern science, the genius 
of modern invention and discovery, the elevated 
character of our institutions ? Will disorder and 
confusion in our modern architectural styles 

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LECTURES ON ARCHITECTURE 

express the intelligence of this twentieth century ? 
Would that we might learn a lesson from the 
past — that modern architecture, wherever under- 
taken, might more worthily tell the story of the 
dignity of this great epoch and be more expressive 
of our contemporaneous life! 



[120] 



ORGANIC ARCHITECTURE 

and 
THE LANGUAGE OF FORM 

BY 

CLAUDE BRAGDON 



ORGANIC ARCHITECTURE 

With the echoes of distant battles in our ears 
and in the face of economic and industrial prob- 
lems which clamor for solution, it may seem the 
height of futility to discuss mere matters of 
aesthetics. It is not so, however, any more than 
it is futile to forecast the harvest even while 
last year's stubble disappears before the plough. 
Outworn social orders go down before the can- 
non and sword in order that mankind may realize 
new ideals of beauty and beneficence already 
existent in the germ. 

It is clear that "the old order changeth," not 
alone in the House of Life, but in the Palace of 
Art. Anarchy clamors at that door too. In 
painting, in music, and in the drama we are 
entered upon that phase in which the bolder 
spirits are rejecting alike the passing fashions 
and the forms sanctified by time, and are seeking 
new generalizations. Architecture, the least 
plastic of the arts, lags a little; but the great 
unrest has seized that also. 

We observe a great confusion of ideas upon 
the whole subject of architecture, not alone on 
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LECTURES ON ARCHITECTURE 

the part of the public, but in the profession itself. 
Eminent architects are found to differ widely in 
their opinions, and these differences find expres- 
sion in their work. It is clear that there is no 
common agreement among them as to what con- 
stitutes excellence. If we apply only the criterion 
of everyday common-sense, it would appear that 
the modern architect has not grasped the modern 
problem. Let me try to prove to you that this 
is so. 

First, the architect of today fails to think and 
work in terms of his place. 

A proof of this failure is found in the unsuit- 
ability of many commonly used architectural 
forms and features to practical needs and to 
climatic and environic conditions. Cornices, 
made for the etching of strong shadows and for 
protection from a tropic sun, frown down from 
the skylines of our cloudy northern cities, where 
they gather dirt and soot in summer and in 
winter become traps for snow and ice. Arcades 
and colonnades, originally designed for shade 
and shelter, rob overstrained eyes of the precious 
light of day. Expensive and useless balustrades 
protect waste spaces of roof where people could 
not take their pleasure if they would. 

Secondly, the architect fails to think and work 
in terms of his time. 

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ORGANIC ARCHITECTURE 

A proof of this failure is found in the perfectly- 
meaningless character of the architectural orna- 
ments in common use: the acanthus scroll, the 
egg and tongue, the Greek fret and waterleaf, 
the festoon and wreath, a cartouche, a shield, a 
lion's head — echoes all of the past, not one elo- 
quent of the present. 

Thirdly , the architect fails to think and work 
in terms of his materials. 

A proof of this failure is found in the common 
practice of substituting one material for another 
— wood for iron, terra-cotta for stone, stone for 
concrete, or vice versa — by reason of their dif- 
ferences in cost, without essential modification 
in design. One of the most important functions 
of architecture is thus violated — the showing 
forth of the splendor and beauty (be it a beauty 
of strength or of fragility) of different materials, 
making the most of the unique characteristics of 
each. 

Now the beauty of terra-cotta, for example, 
is not less than that of stone, but it is different. 
Witness a Delia Robbia lunette and a carved 
granite Egyptian bas-relief. Imagine the terra- 
cotta arcades of the Certosa of Pavia carved in 
stone. One would fairly ache at the thought of 
so much labor and feel a sort of terror at so 
great a weight so insufficiently supported. On 
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LECTURES ON ARCHITECTURE 

the other hand, were the heavily rusticated street 
front of the Pitti Palace in Florence translated, 
without change, from stone to terra-cotta, the 
result would be no less distressing, but for the 
opposite reason. There would be no charm of 
detail and texture to compensate for the splendid 
ponderosity of stone. 

In the face of these facts, it will be well if we 
first of all find out exactly where we stand and 
what we are doing. Let us therefore try to get 
this clear without further loss of time. 

Looking at the matter from the broadest pos- 
sible point of view, it is evident that we dwell 
in a composite environment: that in which we 
find ourselves, Nature; and that which we make 
for ourselves, the product of industry and art. 
In this city of Chicago, for example, a wilder- 
ness of railroads, stockyards, houses, skyscrapers 
has obliterated the earlier wilderness of trees and 
swamp and prairie grass. Nothing so diametri- 
cally foreign to Nature as this gridiron plan and 
these rectilinear buildings could well be imagined. 
Man has himself essayed the role of creator and 
follows a different dream. 

This has been the case more or less ever since 
the stern desire for mastery and the sweet dis- 
ease of art disturbed the balance of Nature in 
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ORGANIC ARCHITECTURE 

men's souls. When we come to consider archi- 
tecture throughout the world and down the ages, 
we find it bisected by a like inevitable duality: 
either it is organic, following the law of natural 
organisms; or it is arranged, according to some 
Euclidian ideal devised by proud-spirited man. 
In other words, it is either cultivated, like the 
flower; or it is cut, like the gem. 

It is important that this fundamental differ- 
ence in aim and method should be clearly per- 
ceived and thoroughly understood. This will be 
best accomplished by comparing and contrasting 
Gothic architecture, so-called, which is pre- 
eminently a striving toward a free organic 
expression of plan and construction, with Renais- 
sance architecture, wherein predetermined canons 
of abstract beauty are imposed. 

The popular conception of Gothic architecture 
is of a manner of building practiced throughout 
the north of Europe during the Middle Ages, 
the distinguishing characteristics of which were 
pointed arches, groined vaulting, buttressed 
walls, traceried windows, and the like. But if 
we study those principles of planning and con- 
struction which produced and determined the 
above-mentioned characteristics of the style, we 
might appropriately describe Gothic as a manner 
of building in which the form is everywhere deter- 

[127] 



LECTURES ON ARCHITECTURE 

mined by the function, changing as that changes. 
Renaissance architecture, on the other hand, 
represents an ideal in conformity with which the 
function is made to accommodate itself, to a 
certain extent, to forms and arrangements chosen 
less with a view to their exact suitability and 
expressiveness than to their innate beauty. In 
short, Gothic architecture is organic; Renaissance 
architecture is arranged. 

These definitions, embodying the distinction 
noted, should not be taken to imply any dis- 
paragement of Renaissance architecture, that 
strained and triply refined medium through 
which some of the noblest strivings of the human 
spirit toward absolute beauty have achieved 
enduring realization. Arranged and organic 
architecture correspond to the two hemispheres 
of thought and feeling into which mankind is 
divided, the one pre-eminently intellectual, the 
other psychic. They represent fundamental dif- 
ferences of principle and ideal, unrelated to 
considerations of time and space. 

In what, more specifically, do these differences 
consist ? The basic one is that organic architec- 
ture, both in its forms and in the disposition of 
these forms, follows everywhere the line of the 
least resistance, achieving an effect of beauty 
mainly by reason of the fact that utility is the 
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ORGANIC ARCHITECTURE 

parent of beauty and that any increase in fitness 
is an increase in beauty. 

In arranged architecture, on the other hand, 
this principle yields precedence to a metaphysical 
ideal of pure or abstract beauty, achieved by the 
employment of forms, rhythms, and arrange- 
ments, developed by a process of selection and 
survival, and having for that reason a less vital 
relation to the whole construction than in the 
case of Gothic architecture. 

Organic architecture does not reject any form 
or any arrangement developed by long use and 
of acknowledged beauty, so long as it, as well 
as another, tells a given story or accomplishes a 
given end. As soon as it becomes inexpressive 
or inefficient, however, by reason of changed 
conditions, it is modified or rejected, or a new 
one is created; whereas in arranged architecture, 
forms originally organic survive even after they 
have lost their raison d'etre. It was for this rea- 
son that the Romans employed the orders after 
they had developed the arch. To the devotee 
of arranged architecture, beauty is its own suffi- 
cient justification; to him who follows the organic 
ideal, as soon as a thing becomes false to the 
mind it ceases to be fair to the eye. 

The spirit behind organic architecture is 
adroit, inventive, fertile, resourceful. It is 
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LECTURES ON ARCHITECTURE 

economical of materials and means, even in its 
most sumptuous creations. It is most itself 
when engaged in attaining a given end in the 
simplest and most direct manner possible. It 
is given to short cuts and uses the tools and 
materials nearest to its hand. The great cathe- 
drals are built of stones of easily manageable 
size, requiring no elaborate machinery. The 
spirit behind arranged architecture, on the other 
hand, disdains these considerations. There is a 
sublime arrogance in the way in which, to com- 
pass one of its grandiose effects, it spends money 
by millions and kills men like flies. The first 
seems to say to Nature: "Permit me, madam, 
to assist you; there is a final felicity which, with 
your permission, I shall add." And it does this 
quite in Nature's manner, without, so to speak, 
disturbing a hair of her head. The second says, 
rather, "I'll show you a trick worth two of that," 
and proceeds to obliterate the landscape and put 
something altogether different in its place. It is 
inconceivable, for example, that the Gothic 
builders would have converted a swamp into a 
pleasure garden, as Louis XIV, that prince of 
bromides, did at Versailles, at such enormous 
cost of lives and treasure. It is equally incon- 
ceivable that the architects of the Renaissance 
would have hung a church upon a crag, as the 

[i3°] 



ORGANIC ARCHITECTURE 

mediaeval builders did at Mont Saint Michel — 
without, at least, leveling and terracing the crag. 
In all true Gothic there exists so intimate a 
relation between the interior arrangement and 
the exterior appearance — between the plan and 
the elevation — that from a study of the latter 
the former may with fair accuracy be read. The 
manner of construction rules the whole structure 
and declares itself at sight. In Renaissance 
architecture, even at its best, this by no means 
follows; the elevation, determined by considera- 
tions of grandeur, symmetry, proportion, is often 
only a mask. St. Paul's Cathedral, in London, 
is an example of this. The buttresses of the 
arches of the nave are concealed behind a cur- 
tain wall surmounted by a balustrade which 
stands, independent of any roof, high aloft in 
the air. The stone lantern which crowns the 
dome appears to be supported by it, but the 
visible dome is of wood, a falsework which con- 
ceals the truncated cone of brickwork which 
alone saves the lantern from tumbling into the 
center of the church. This mendacity of the 
Renaissance spirit is one of its distinguishing 
characteristics. The application to a wall of 
columns and entablature, arches and imposts, 
which support nothing, not even themselves, is 
one of its most common and most innocuous 

[131] 



LECTURES ON ARCHITECTURE 

forms. Some of these artifices are quite justi- 
fiable from the standpoint of mere aesthetics, as 
I shall endeavor to show in my second lecture; 
but the true Gothicist will have none of them, 
his motto being, "Beauty is Truth; Truth, 
Beauty." 

In arranged architecture, the various parts and 
details are assembled and combined by the 
sovereign good taste of the architect; in organic, 
they are melted and fused by the creative heat, 
the eagerness for self-expression. In whatever 
form it ^appears, organic architecture seems to 
spring up without effort, almost of its own voli- 
tion, a natural outcropping of national and racial 
vitality. Men do not have to learn to understand 
it; they recognize themselves in it because they 
carry the clue to its meaning in their hearts. 
Arranged architecture, on the other hand, is the 
self-conscious embodiment of the pomp and the 
pride of life. Like Little Jack Horner, it seems 
to say, "What a great boy am I!" 

It is not profitable to multiply these distinc- 
tions, for this might lead more to confusion than 
to clarity of mind. It is necessary only to re- 
member that the real point of cleavage between 
organic and arranged architecture is the one first 
dwelt upon. In order to determine to which 
hemisphere of expression a given building belongs 

[I3 2 ] 



ORGANIC ARCHITECTURE 

it is necessary only to apply the acid test of 
Mr. Sullivan's formula and ask, "Does the form 
follow the function, or is the function made 
subservient to the form ? Did the spirit build 
the house, or does the house confine the spirit ?" 
If the first, it is organic; if the second, it is 
arranged. 

Ponder this formula, then apply it. Strange 
truths emerge. It is plain from existing evi- 
dences, and from our knowledge of their psychol- 
ogy, that the Greeks built in the organic spirit, 
and that there is more real identity in principle 
between the Erechtheum, let us say, and the 
Saint Chapelle, than between the former and 
the most correctly classic building in all Paris. 
The Romans worked organically in the planning 
and construction of their vast and complicated 
basilicas, theaters, and baths; but they knew 
not where to stay their hand, and, seduced by a 
beauty which they did not comprehend, they 
meaninglessly applied the orders to their arch 
and vault construction — that is, they employed 
organic forms as mere ornament, after the vir- 
tue had flowed out of them by reason of a change 
of structural methods. 

Turning the searchlight of our formula in dif- 
ferent directions up and down the ages, we 
discern that the Church of Santa Sophia in 

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LECTURES ON ARCHITECTURE 

Constantinople is organic, for the reason that 
it consists of a single consistent system of con- 
struction — that of the round arch and spherical 
vault — carried to its logical development, no- 
where hidden, everywhere expressed. The 
Houses of Parliament in London, on the other 
hand, with a whole bagful of Gothic tricks, are 
nevertheless arranged architecture. They are 
this for the reason that the elaborately com- 
posed river facade gives no hint of what lies 
behind it, and the towers might have been in 
one place as well as another, or not at all, so 
far as any necessity is concerned. In other 
words, the element of inevitability is lacking, 
that sure index of the organic spirit. Called 
upon to create a Gothic design, Sir William 
Barry, the architect, could change the clothing 
of his idea, but not the complexion of his 
mind. 

It is held by those who have intimate knowl- 
edge of the curious architecture of Japan that 
the Japanese built organically in the carrying 
of wood architecture to the highest logical de- 
velopment that the world has ever seen. 
That Mr. Cram should himself be the author 
of a delightful and scholarly treatise on Jap- 
anese architecture is an eloquent fact in this 
connection. 

[134] 



ORGANIC ARCHITECTURE 

Coming again to the consideration of modern 
architecture here in America — barring a few 
thrice-blessed exceptions — it is certainly not 
organic, and to call it arranged would place it in 
the same category with the masterpieces of the 
Renaissance, which would be to pay it a higher 
tribute than it deserves. 

Let us consider the main features of this archi- 
tecture, if on the face of chaos features can be 
discerned. To consider modern architecture 
from the standpoint of structure presents no 
difficulty. Every important building of today 
adheres to substantially one method of construc- 
tion. Even a layman knows its characteristic 
features: a steel framework, floors and roof of 
hollow tile or reinforced concrete, an outer cover- 
ing of brick, stone, or terra-cotta, as the case 
may be. But when we come to consider the 
language in which the story is told to the be- 
holder, there is the greatest confusion of tongues. 
Venetian palaces elbow French chateaux and 
Roman temples; pseudo-Gothic competes with 
neo-Greek, each masquerading as something 
other than it is — a Brobdingnagian saturnalia 
of vociferous unreason. 

The cause of this discrepancy between the 
inner structure and its outward manifestation is 
not far to seek. The construction has been 

[135] 



LECTURES ON ARCHITECTURE 

shaped by the living hand of necessity, and is 
therefore rational and logical; the outward 
expression is the result of the architect's "dig- 
ging in the boneyard." There has been laid 
upon it the dead hand of the past. Free of this 
incubus, the engineer has succeeded; subject to 
it, the architect has failed. That is, he has not 
seen that the new construction imperatively 
demanded a new space-language for its expres- 
sion. By limiting himself to the great styles 
of the past and the forms developed by super- 
seded methods of construction, he has shown 
himself impotent to create for this great age 
an architecture eloquent of it. This is the 
manner and measure of his failure, and it is 
grave. 

Now it is true that architectural styles are 
not created merely by taking thought of the 
matter, but grow imperceptibly, new conditions 
modifying old traditions. Conservatism in archi- 
tecture is therefore a good and necessary thing, 
but in times like the present conservatism ceases 
to be a virtue. The architect who clings blindly 
to precedent in dealing with the unprecedented, 
as he is now constantly forced to do, is in the 
position of the boy who stood on the burning 
deck. This habitual attitude of looking back- 
ward at the past over the shoulder of the present, 

[136] 



ORGANIC ARCHITECTURE 

instead of fronting the future, has resulted for 
the architect in the atrophy of his creative 
faculty. 
• Of course, no architect can afford to dispense 
with a knowledge of his art as practiced through- 
out the world and down the ages. It is even well 
that he should train himself to think and work 
in terms of this style and of that, if only to learn 
that a style takes its form and characteristics 
from the materials and methods of construction 
employed, and its ornament from the racial and 
national psychology. From the history of archi- 
tecture nothing is clearer than that a change of 
construction, or a change of consciousness, de- 
mands and finds fresh architectural forms for 
its expression. We of today use a kind of con- 
struction unknown to the ancients, and our psy- 
chology is different; yet we look about us in 
vain for a space-language which expresses both 
in terms of beauty. I use the term "space- 
language" because the time-language of today 
already exists or is in process of formation in 
the modern drama, the modern novel, and mod- 
ern music — new art forms made to meet new 
needs of expression. The need is not less 
urgent for a new architectural language. It is 
bound to come in time. The question natu- 
rally arises: To which of the two hemispheres 

[137] 



LECTURES ON ARCHITECTURE 

before mentioned will it belong; will it be 
organic or will it be arranged ? 

The answer to this question is probably in- 
volved in the answer to a more grave and vital 
question, one which the clouded and ambiguous 
aspect of the times cannot fail to suggest to every 
thoughtful mind. Putting aside all purely local 
and temporal issues, the great issue of the im- 
mediate future is between the forces of material- 
ism, on the one hand, which work against the 
practical realization of human brotherhood, and 
those obscure spiritual forces which are working 
for it. If materialism triumphs — and materialism 
is as strongly intrenched in the hovel as in the 
mansion, in the church as in the market-place — 
architecture, however highly developed and per- 
fected, will be the work of slaves for masters — 
arranged by master-minds. If, on the other hand, 
the spirit of democracy and of true brotherhood 
triumphs, architecture will become again organic^ 
the ponderable expression of the truths of the 
spirit, wrought out in all humility and loving- 
ness by those who are its subjects but not its 
slaves. 

We are warranted in this conclusion by the 
history of art itself. Every organic architectural 
evolution followed in the wake of a religious im- 
pulse, and the ideal of brotherhood is the impulse 

[138] 



ORGANIC ARCHITECTURE 

which today moves men to those fervors and 
renunciations which have marked the religious 
manifestations of times past. If today we use, 
only to misuse, the architectural languages of 
the past, it is because materialism holds us and 
rules us; if tomorrow we are able to express 
ourselves in a language of new beauty, it will be 
the result of some fresh outpouring of spiritual 
force, such as occurred long ago in Egypt, later 
in Greece, in China following the introduction 
of Buddhism, and in Northern Europe during 
the two mystic centuries of the Middle Ages. 
Signs are not lacking that this change will come 
upon us too. The dense materiality of modern 
life is not necessarily an adverse factor; for of 
all paradoxes this is the most sublime, that good 
comes from evil, purity from corruption. The 
favorite food of epicures springs from the 
dunghill; the unspeakable saturnalia of Imperial 
Rome had issue in Christian saints and martyrs. 
Already may be noted presages of change. In 
the familiar warmed and lighted chamber of our 
everyday environment we sit snugly content, 
playing at what we call the game of life, when 
suddenly, just when we fancied we were safest, 
we are rapt out of ourselves into the infinite 
beatitude, as a fevered gambler might be 
summoned from his table by some beautiful, 

U39] 



LECTURES ON ARCHITECTURE 

veiled woman, who leads him out into the cool, 
illimitable night. 

After such an experience, life can never be 
the same. You who have dreamed are forced to 
follow your dream — to realize it if you are an 
artist. From that day you are bound by an 
obligation which others do not and need not 
share. You can no longer dissipate your time 
and such talents as you possess in assimilating 
the popular taste in order to reproduce it. This 
would be a prostitution far more ignoble than 
that of the man who has never been thus elected 
to the service of beauty. To him, the fleshpots of 
the world, the price of a virtue which was never his; 
to you, the eternal quest, wherever it may lead. 

Do not conceive of beauty in any narrow way, 
as limited to mere aesthetics. Seek out the 
things that thrill you and be sure that there is 
beauty in them, for the test of beauty is the 
measure of the joy it brings. Beauty is mystery 
and enchantment, the thing with star-dust on it. 
Learn to recognize the brush of its invisible wing, 
not alone in art galleries and concert halls, but 
in a face in a crowd, a song at twilight, moonrise, 
sunset; in the din and glare of cities as well as 
in the silence of great spaces; in the train taking 
its flight to the seaboard as well as in the crow 
taking its flight to the rooky wood. 
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ORGANIC ARCHITECTURE 

Knowing not when nor in what questionable 
shape beauty may reveal itself, it behooves you 
to cultivate so wide a catholicity of taste that 
no manifestation, however strange and disturb- 
ing, may pass untested through the alembic of 
your mind. You should constantly strive to 
realize what I have called the organic ideal in 
the work of your hands, not permitting your 
personal power of invention to atrophy by con- 
tinual copying of the work of others, no matter 
how beautiful nor how sanctioned by time that 
work may be. Of everything you create you 
should ask: first, is it sincere and expressive; 
second, is it beautiful to you ? 

Doubtless failure will crown your efforts more 
often than success. A pioneer and a precursor 
in a movement which, when all is said, may never 
move, the best that you can hope for is to labor 
at the foundation of a Palace of Art which will 
be reared, if it is reared at all, by other hands. 
Your reward will be that should the tide turn, 
while you live and work, from the ordered ideal 
to the organic, some part of the mighty current 
will flow through you, instead of tossing you 
relentlessly aside. 

Because the word "Gothic" has been taken 
as the type of the art which is organic and 
"Renaissance" as a type of that which is ar- 

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LECTURES ON ARCHITECTURE 

ranged, there is still danger of misunderstanding. 
Comprehend clearly that in speaking of organic 
architecture I do not refer solely to the art as 
practiced during the Middle Ages; in speaking 
of Renaissance architecture I use it only as 
indicative of a habit of mind which is timeless. 
If we except the architecture of edifices of the 
established religion in which the Gothic style is 
traditional, and therefore appropriate, nothing 
could be more absurd than the use by us of the 
mere externals of the mediaeval Gothic style. 
The forms of classic and Renaissance architec- 
ture are, of the two, on the whole more appro- 
priate and amenable to modern needs and 
conditions; and if we are sticklers for precedent, 
they are better justified. The architecture of 
the future, whether arranged or organic, will 
probably resemble neither Gothic nor Renais- 
sance. If it springs from deep within the soul, 
it will unfold new and unimagined beauties. If 
it is a product of the purely rational conscious- 
ness, it will consist of additions to, and modifica- 
tions of, the architecture which we already have. 
Because spirituality is the source of all beauty, 
arranged architecture proceeds from and suc- 
ceeds organic. When the mystic spirit which 
produces organic architecture departs, the forms 
of its creating survive by reason of their beauty, 

[142] 



ORGANIC ARCHITECTURE 

but they are meaninglessly employed. All of 
the time-honored forms and arrangements of our 
so-called classic architecture were originally 
organic. Nothing could be more organic than 
the colonnade of a Grecian temple; nothing 
could be less so than the same colonnade with an 
iron stanchion buried in each column and the 
lintel held up by concealed steel beams. 

Now, while it is necessary to draw these dis- 
tinctions, and even to insist upon them, there is 
a higher synthesis in which they disappear. 
Every masterpiece disdains and defies classifi- 
cation. If it succeeds, we know that whatever 
the means and methods, they can be only the 
right ones and are their own sufficient justifica- 
tion. As a matter of fact, every architectural 
masterpiece, whatever its style or period, is both 
organic and arranged. However artificial it may 
be, it obeys some organic law of the mind; how- 
ever naturalistic, it is full of self-conscious 
artifice. 

In art there is a demonic element which places 
it above and beyond all man-made classifications 
and categories. The true artist is guided by an 
over-soul, whether he acknowledges or whether 
he denies its sway. 

The passive master lent his hand 

To the vast soul that o'er him planned. 

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LECTURES ON ARCHITECTURE 

It is this larger aspect of the whole subject 
which I propose to treat in my next lecture. In 
it I shall occupy myself, not with differences, 
but with identities. I shall attempt to discover 
the unchanging principles which determine every 
kind of formal beauty, to indicate the rudiments 
of the grammar of that language through which 
every thought of the human mind which writes 
itself on space must needs be expressed. 



[144] 



VI 
THE LANGUAGE OF FORM 

In my previous lecture I tried to make you 
acutely conscious of the confusion of tongues 
which attends the building of our towers of Babel, 
and I endeavored to arouse you to the need of 
developing a form-language which should be to 
the modern world what Greek architecture was 
to Pagan Greece, Gothic architecture to Chris- 
tian Europe. As a preliminary to this high 
endeavor, let us seek to discover some of the 
unchanging principles which are at the root of 
every kind of beauty— in other words, to formu- 
late the rhetoric of spatial expression. 

The first and chief of these principles is un- 
doubtedly that of unity; for the potency of any 
work of art is measured largely by the singleness 
of its appeal. An Egyptian pyramid, for example, 
has unity, but this quality is inherent in a Greek 
temple as well. In the case of the pyramid, the 
means whereby the effect of unity is produced 
are clear: every line leads to the summit; all 
converge into a single visible point. In the case 
of the Greek temple, the means remain a mystery 
to the beholder, but, as a matter of fact, in 

[145] 



LECTURES ON ARCHITECTURE 

principle they are the same. The difference is 
that in the latter case the focal point is not visible; 
it is a point in space, high aloft in the air. Most 
of you probably know that the columns of the 
Parthenon all have a slight inclination inward. 
They are not parallel, but convergent; and if 
their axes were prolonged they would at last 
intersect. I do not claim, of course, that the 
effect of unity is solely due to this artifice; but 
this artifice is a contribution to it. As a symbol, 
it is magnificent. All manifoldness proceeds 
from and returns to the invisible where it is one. 
This matter of invisible focal points is highly 
important. Did you ever think that somewhere 
in the air under the great open eye of the roof 
of the Roman Pantheon is a point which deter- 
mined every arc of the curve of the giant dome; 
that somewhere in the ruined arena of the Colos- 
seum are the two foci which determined the 
sweep of its circumscribing walls; that aloft in 
the apse of a Gothic cathedral is a point to which 
all its vaults converge and from which they seem 
to emanate ? About the center of the central 
arch of most of the best triumphal arches is 
described a greater circle which determines the 
main proportions of the rectangular structure. 
These and similar artifices aid in co-ordinating 
the edifice into one memorable impression. 

[146] 



THE LANGUAGE OF FORM 

If unity is the first and controlling principle 
of a form-language, what is the second ? Before 
we come to that, let us ask ourselves what a 
form-language is. It is some aggregation of 
symbols, borrowed from nature or fabricated by 
art, in endless variety of combination, for the 
expression of some ideal thing. By means of 
these symbols the inner spirit of life is drawn 
into a kind of diagrammatic representation of 
its nature and gets itself externalized — made 
flesh, so to speak. But behind the forms and 
arrangements employed, whether they are nat- 
ural or artificial, are geometrical forms and 
arrangements; for "Nature geometrizes," as 
Emerson says. A form-language, therefore, may 
be reduced to geometry in the same way that a 
spoken language may be resolved into sounds 
and combinations of sounds. Just as sounds 
may be classified as vowel and consonant, so 
may forms be classified as straight (rectilinear) 
and curved, masses as light and dark, or as void 
and solid, producing the effect of light and dark. 
Colors, similarly, are warm and cold, brilliant 
and neutral, gay and grave. 

This, then, is our second principle, duality — 
the polarity of related opposites. Before apply- 
ing this principle to composition, let us discrim- 
inate between the different kinds of composition. 

[147] 



LECTURES ON ARCHITECTURE 

For our purposes, there are three kinds: line 
composition, mass composition — that is, notan, 
light and dark — and color composition. In a 
sense these correspond to line, plane, and solid — 
spaces of one, two, and three dimensions. Linear 
composition involves neither of the other two; 
notan composition, being concerned with light 
and dark masses, cannot dispense with line, for 
lines bound these masses; color composition 
combines both line and mass. As the method of 
the mind is to proceed from the simple to the 
complex, the Japanese, those masters of composi- 
tion, in producing their designs devote them- 
selves first to the problem of line rhythms, then 
to the disposition of their lights and darks, and 
finally to color harmony, though they keep all 
three things in mind simultaneously, as is neces- 
sary for a successful issue; otherwise these things 
interfere with and destroy one another. 

Since I have mentioned Japanese art, let us 
take for our first illustration of the law of duality, 
or polarity, one of Hiroshige's best-known color 
prints, "The Pine Tree on an Island" (see Fig. i). 
It is so faithful a rendering of the subject that a 
Japanese, seeing the print in my office, exclaimed, 
"I have been to that place, I have seen that 
wonderful old tree." And yet, though so true 
to nature, it is a piece of self-conscious art. The 
[148] 




B AS RELIEF OF ATHENA AND 
HER OWL 



THE LANGUAGE OF FORM 

line composition is as simple and uncompromising 
as could well be — the vertical lines of the straight- 
falling rain, the horizontal lines of the water, and 
the island, in strong contrast to the irregular 
curved outline of the pine tree. The mass com- 
position is not less simple and conforms to, and 
accentuates, the line composition — the light sky, 
the darker water and embankment, the dark 
foliage. These three in color are, respectively, 
gray, blue, and black. With nothing to mitigate 
this cold color scheme, however, the law of 
polarity would not be honored by a due observ- 
ance, so the artist has introduced a note of dull 
red in the upper left-hand corner — a matter of 
no pictorial significance, but necessary to the 
color harmony of the whole. 

My second example, a bas-relief of Athena 
with her owl — Attic work of about 465 B.C. (see 
Fig. 2) — exhibits the same artful juxtaposition 
of straight lines and curves, even more simply 
disposed and contrasted. There is here the 
same regard for related masses, and, though 
unfortunately the color has disappeared (it was 
once colored; for the end of the spear was 
apparently painted on), we cannot doubt that 
the law of color contrast received recognition too. 

It was the all but universal practice of artists 
of the great age of the Renaissance to display 

[149] 



LECTURES ON ARCHITECTURE 

their figures in an architectural setting, for this 
was the most obvious and effective way of 
achieving the contrast between geometrical and 
flowing forms to which I call your attention. I 
need not show examples, for you yourselves will 
recall any number. Instead, I shall exhibit a 
photograph of a painting of later date, David's 
exquisite portrait of Madame Recamier, which, 
by reason of the obviousness of its composition, 
is related more nearly to the examples you have 
already seen (see Fig. 3). Note how the gracious 
curve of the womanly figure is enhanced by its 
contrast with the long horizontal line of the 
couch and by the vertical standard of the 
candelabrum. 

Transferring our attention now to architecture, 
we find in this familiar combination of arch and 
engaged order the same polarity of which I speak 
(see Fig. 4). From these simple elements "has 
been expanded the architectural art, as a great 
and superb language wherewith man has ex- 
pressed, through the generations, the changing 
drift of his thoughts." In the Romanesque portal 
of Saint Trophime at Aries you find those ele- 
ments more beautifully, because more logically, 
arranged (see Fig. 5). Learn to give them instant 
recognition, wherever encountered, be it in such a 
grand combination as is exhibited by the cam- 

[150] 



THE LANGUAGE OF FORM 



THE, LAW OF TRINITY. 




panile of St. Mark's 
against the long hori- 
zontal and many- 
domed church of 
St. Mark, or in so 
small a thing as a 
simple egg and dart. 
The source and secret 
of beauty are the 
same in both cases — 
contrasting straight 
and curved forms. 

The third law to 
which I would direct 
your attention is the 
law of trinity. It is 
latent, as you already 
doubtless discern, in 
polarity — for everything is from its very nature 
twofold; but while the semicircular arch changes 
imperceptibly from vertical to horizontal, and 
therefore may be considered a unit, vertical and 
horizontal lines cannot be thus reconciled and 
must be recognized as independent. Therefore 
we have in architecture three elements: lines 
vertical, horizontal, and curved. 

Now there is a secret potency which appears 
to reside in the number three itself. At least 

[151] 



A ROMAN IONIC ARCADE bV 
VIGNOLE^-THE COLUMN. THE, 
ENTABLATURE AND THE ARCH 
CORRESPOND TO LINES VERT 
LOAD HORIZONTAL AND CURVED 



Fig. 



LECTURES ON ARCHITECTURE 

three notes are necessary for full harmony in 
music, the three primary colors for complete 
color harmony, and the trinity of vertical, hori- 
zontal, and curved lines for architectural har- 
mony. Three straight lines are the least number 
which will inclose a space. The geometrical 
correlative of the number three is naturally the 
triangle, and particularly the equilateral triangle. 
This figure, for which the eye has an especial 
fondness, is everywhere present in the arts of 
design, sometimes clearly displayed, more often 
obscurely. It performs the function of uniting 
and co-ordinating the various parts of a design 
in a manner analogous to that in which the 
accompaniment carries along and co-ordinates 
an air. So universal was the recognition of this 
need of the eye during the great age of Renais- 
sance painting that the pyramidal composition 
became one of its conventions. Introduced by 
Fra Bartolomeo, it continued to be employed to 
and through the decadence. You all recall 
plenty of examples, but to show you just what I 
mean I call your attention to the triangular 
synopsis of Andrea del Sarto's "Madonna del 
Sacco" (see Fig. 6). 

Architecture, of whatever style and period, is 
rich in similar examples. Out of many hundreds 
I show only one: the perfect little Erechtheum 

[152] 



THE LANGUAGE OF FORM 



APPLICATION OF THE- EQU I LATERAL 
TRIANGLE, TO THL ERECHTHEUM~ 
AT ATHENS 




WEST SIDE, 



POR£H OF THE, CARYATIDES 



Fig. 7 



of the Athenian Acropolis (see Fig. 7). The 
main proportions of French cathedrals were 
determined by this sort of triangulation, both in 
plan and in section, as Viollet le Due has shown 
in the first volume of his Discourses. 

[»S3] 



LECTURES ON ARCHITECTURE 

Thus it is that every priest of the religion of 
Beauty must be a Unitarian, a Dualist, and a 
Trinitarian. He is no less a Nature-worshiper, 
and in his communion with her visible forms he 
cannot but discover her infinite manifoldness. 
This leads him to the perception of a fourth 
principle of aesthetics, that of variety in unity, 
of the part imaged in the whole and the whole 
in the part. Nature is an air with variations; 
she abounds in repetitions, echoes, consonances. 
Surely I need not give examples of this, and yet 
to put the matter clearly before you, note the 
major and minor repetition of the theme in the 
subsidiary details of Titian's "Sacred and Pro- 
fane Love"; note also the reversed and con- 
trasted triangles (see Fig. 8). In architecture, 
the flutes of a Greek Doric column are echoed 
in the channeled triglyphs above. The balus- 
trade of a Renaissance colonnade repeats the 
colonnade itself; the flanking domes of Brunelles- 
chi's great dome of the cathedral of Florence 
prepare the eye for the mighty upward sweep. 

The fifth principle to which I would direct 
your attention is not less obvious and universal, 
but it is one for which it is difficult to find a 
name. Call it rhythmic diminution. This law 
is in the eye itself; for any series of equal and 
regular units, such as a row of columns and their 

[154] 




O b 



THE LANGUAGE OF FORM 

intercolumniations, for example, when viewed in 
perspective become rhythmically unequal. They 
diminish as they recede from the eye, accord- 
ing to a mathematical law. This law is in the 
ear itself; for any musical note dies away into 
harmonics, each one fainter and higher than the 
last. Observe a column of smoke rising in still 
air. It puts forth spirals, these spirals split up 
into smaller spirals, and so on. A tree segre- 
gates, in the same way, into branches and the 
branches into twigs. These things will give you 
an idea of what I mean by rhythmic diminution. 
In architecture it is illustrated by the entasis of 
a column, by the diminishing spiral of an Ionic 
volute, by the artifice of superimposing the 
slenderer and more ornate orders on the simpler 
and sturdier. The most perfect and complete 
expression is found perhaps in a Gothic cathe- 
dral, which from a simple and massive substruc- 
ture rears a veritable lacework of pinnacles 
against the sky. Gothic architecture and Gothic 
tracery rise flamelike, growing more intricate 
and wonderful as they ascend. 

The sixth principle is that of radiation. 
Radiation is the arrangement of the units of a 
composition with reference to focal points — the 
relation of variables to some invariable. This, 
too, is in the eye itself and in the ear itself; for 

[155] 



LECTURES ON ARCHITECTURE 

all horizontal lines in architecture appear to 
converge at the point of sight on the horizon, 
and in music the air returns to the tonic note 
of the scale. In radiation we return by a long 
detour to our starting-point, unity. They are 
opposite aspects of one and the same thing. 
You may say that all the lines of a pyramid 
lead from base to apex, but it is no less true that 
from the apex all lines lead to the base. 

To illustrate the universality of these six 
principles in art, and to fix them more firmly 
in your mind by a recapitulation, I show you in 
what manner they are obeyed and illustrated 
in an acknowledged masterpiece of painting, 
Leonardo's "Last Supper" (see Fig. 9). It has 
unity: it poignantly portrays a dramatic moment 
in the life of the Savior of mankind. The vari- 
ous parts are fused by the creative fire in the 
soul of the artist into one memorable impres- 
sion. Duality is achieved by the time-honored 
device of placing the figures in an architectural 
setting; the long horizontal of the table, the 
vertical panels of the walls, are what the accom- 
paniment is to the air. Trinity appears in the 
three openings of the background, the arrange- 
ment of the twelve disciples in four groups of 
three figures each, and in the inclosure of the 
central figure of Christ in an equilateral triangle. 

[156] 



THE LANGUAGE OF FORM 

By the law of consonance this triangle is echoed, 
as it were, in the triangular supports of the table 
and in the triangular synopses to which the 
groups of figures variously submit themselves. 
The great drama is broken up into a number of 
individual dramas, portrayed on the faces of the 
disciples as the Master utters the fateful words, 
"One of you shall betray me." Rhythmic dimi- 
nution is illustrated in the diminishing lengths 
and sizes of the wall panels and the ceiling 
beams; and radiation, by reason of the fact that 
the point of sight of the whole composition, to 
which all the horizontal lines vanish, is in the 
figure of Christ. 

I do not claim that every masterpiece illus- 
trates these laws in this completeness and per- 
fection, but no masterpiece was ever created 
which does not illustrate some of them. They 
need not have been present in the mind of the 
artist who conceives the work, nor of the 
observer who contemplates it, in order to exer- 
cise their potent magic. You should know about 
them because they constitute the mode and 
method whereby the spirit of life writes itself in 
materiality. I do not claim that they constitute 
the only mode and method. Other laws there 
are, no less fundamental and universal. Books 
have been written upon the spiral line in nature 

[157] 



LECTURES ON ARCHITECTURE 

and art; numerical ratios, corresponding to 
the consonant musical intervals, properly con- 
stitute part of the rhetoric of the language of 
form; but these things I can only mention, for 
I must now pass to the consideration of the 
second necessary element in a language of form — 
ornament. 

A complete and adequate form-language con- 
sists, first, in a system of construction expressing 
itself in appropriate forms, and a system of 
ornament, though it is true that these two 
things are sometimes so vitally related as to be 
scarcely separable. The architectural forms 
come of themselves — they are a matter of 
orderly evolution — but this is not so true of 
ornament. Ornament depends less upon struc- 
tural necessity than upon psychology. It is the 
psychological mood objectively presented or 
expressed. This is the reason why any muti- 
lated and time-worn fragment out of the great 
past, when art was a living language, can be 
assigned with certainty to its place and its period. 
The connoisseur has no difficulty in discriminat- 
ing between Chinese, Hindu, Egyptian, Greek, 
and Etruscan ornament, because in each the 
soul of a people found adequate and appropriate 
utterance. The fact that today, when it comes 
to the question of ornament, we are content to 

[158] 



THE LANGUAGE OF FORM 

adorn our creations with the grave-clothes of 
whatever dead style suits our fancy is simply 
one proof the more that we have no form- 
language of our own. While the development 
of architecture along new lines may safely be left 
to necessity and time and is already just beyond 
the horizon, the same is not true of ornament. 
We have done nothing in this field of any value 
whatever. We have not even tried to do any- 
thing, but have been perfectly content to beg 
the whole question. It is clear that we can do 
so no longer; but in what direction shall we seek ? 
Three alternatives suggest themselves: first, 
a new ornamental mode might be the creation 
of some wonderfully gifted individual; second, 
it could be derived from nature; third, it 
might be developed from geometry. Let us 
consider each of these alternatives. The first 
we must summarily reject. Even supposing the 
advent of a personal savior in this field, the im- 
position of the idiosyncratic space rhythm of a 
single individual upon an entire architecture 
would be unfortunate. Genius does not propa- 
gate itself; it descends neither from father to 
son nor from teacher to disciple. In Mr. Sullivan, 
for example, we have an ornamentalist of the 
highest originality and distinction, quite aside 
from his sterling qualities as an architect; but 

[159] 



LECTURES ON ARCHITECTURE 

his secret is incommunicable, his disciples either 
imitate his mannerisms or they develop a man- 
ner and a method of their own. This leaves 
us with our problem unsolved. We do not want 
an ornament which is individual, but one which 
is universal; not one which has style, but one 
which is a style. 

Consider now the second suggestion: shall we 
be able to find what we seek by conventionalizing 
natural forms ? There is precedent for such a 
procedure. The Egyptian lotus, the Greek 
honeysuckle, the Indian palmette, the acanthus, 
achieved their apotheoses in art. Even today 
in Japan, where art is still a living language, the 
bamboo, the chrysanthemum, the wistaria, are 
successfully used as motifs for ornament. I 
think it would be a very good thing if the prob- 
lem of the conventionalization of our native 
fruits and flowers were given to art students 
instead of the botanizing of old dry specimens. 
This has been done and is being done to some 
extent, but as a solution of the problem of orna- 
ment, it offers one difficulty which should not 
be overlooked. Today the native flora of a 
country loses much of its distinctive quality by 
reason of scientific agriculture and intensive cul- 
tivation under glass, coupled with ease and 
rapidity in the matter of transportation. Corn, 
[160] 



THE LANGUAGE OF FORM 

buckwheat, tobacco, though indigenous to Amer- 
ica, are less distinctively so than they once were. 
Moreover, our divorce from nature is more com- 
plete—so much so that dwellers in the city, where 
the giant flora of architecture for the most part 
raise their skyscraping heads, are more familiar 
with corn in the can than corn on the cob; they 
know buckwheat only in the form of buckwheat 
cakes; and not one smoker in ten would recog- 
nize tobacco as it grows in the fields. This 
vitiates, though it does not veto, recourse to 
natural forms for ornament. 

The third alternative remains to be considered, 
and, to my thinking, it is that in which resides 
the richest promise. Let us consider it with care. 
Geometry has furnished, not one system of orna- 
ment, but many. A great deal of Chinese and 
Hindu ornament is rigidly geometrical; Moorish 
ornament is almost exclusively so. Gothic tra- 
cery is nothing but combinations of straight 
lines, circles, and the arcs of circles. The inter- 
esting development of decorative art which has 
taken place in Germany of late years makes use 
of little else but the square and the circle, the 
parallelogram and the ellipse. These systems, 
all derived from geometry, are widely different 
from one another. What has been done can 
be done; geometry may provide us with 
[161] 



LECTURES ON ARCHITECTURE 




the very thing we 
seek. The problem 
is simply one of 
selection and de- 
velopment. How 
shall we set about 
our task ? For we 
are in the position 
of Sinbad in the 
valley of diamonds; 
we are surrounded 
by treasure of which 
we do not know 
how to possess our- 
selves. 

Ornament must 
not only satisfy 
the aesthetic sense, 
but it must be symbolically significant. This 
can be accomplished if in some way ornament 
can be made to indicate the trend of con- 
sciousness — if some relation can be established 
between ornament and psychology. This may 
seem at first thought an impossible proposition, 
but perhaps it is not so impossible as it appears. 
Do not think that I am only juggling with words 
when I suggest that the problem may be solved 
by recourse to the fourth dimension of space. 
[162] 



PATTERN DERIVED FROM 
GROUPED CUBES 




A BAY WINDOW 
Fig. ii 



THE LANGUAGE OF FORM 

This is a phrase of varied and ambiguous mean- 
ings, often heard, yet little understood — under- 
stood least, perhaps, by those who use it most. 
To the mathematician it means a direction at 
right angles to every one of the so-called three 
dimensions of space. By the man on the street 
it is used to describe anything which is arcane 
and mysterious. 

But behind this loose use of a loose phrase lies 
a true intuition: the intuition, namely, that the 
modern mind, so lately exclusively scientific, 
enamored of mere facts, has taken a turn in a 
new direction at right angles to every direction 
known heretofore. The past few years have wit- 
nessed the rebirth of wonder. Science, scornful 
of the occult, has now an occult of its own to 
deal with. Philosophy, hopeless of translating 
life through the reason in terms of inertia, per- 
ceived a universal flux, the meaning of which the 
intuition alone can grasp; and religion, aban- 
doning its narrow orthodoxies and man-made 
moralities of a superior prudence, seeks the 
mystical experience above and before all. To 
each the best thing in the world has come to 
seem something out of it. Our House of Life, 
where we had thought to dwell always more 
snug and content, is haunted by footfalls from 
another world. Now the fourth dimension of 

[163] 



LECTURES ON ARCHITECTURE 




the mathematician 
is a perfect symbol 
of this land which 
is "back of the 
north wind and 
behind the looking 
glass." The sub- 
lime idea that the 
personal self of each 
one of us is but the 
transitory mani- 
festation on the 
plane of materiality 
of an immortal 
individual whose 
habitat is on higher 
planes of being, has 
its analogue in the mathematical conception that 
all three-dimensional figures are projections on 
three-dimensional space of four-dimensional 

forms. That is, the 

sphere is the pro- 
jection of the hyper- 
sphere, the cube of 
the hyper-cube, and 
so on, in the same 
way that the circle 
may be considered 



PATTERN DERIVED FROM THE 
600-HEDROID 




Fig. 13 



:i6 4 ] 




AN ORGAN CASE 
Fig. 14 



THE LANGUAGE OF FORM 

as the plane projection of the sphere, the 
square of the cube. The elements of four- 
dimensional figures are known to mathematics. 
Their projection in spaces of lower dimen- 
sions is a matter of no great difficulty. What 
I propose, therefore, is to derive from these 
projections material for ornament, and in so 
doing to symbolize the dominant fact of the 
modern world, that we are attempting to explore 
that reality from which we are shut off by the 
limitations of our sensuous mechanism. 

Four-dimensional geometry is as real a thing 
and richer far than three-dimensional geometry, 
bearing the same relation to the latter as that 
does to plane geometry. It is indeed so rich a 
field that only a few of the most elementary 
figures and configurations are sufficient to fur- 
nish the ornamentalist with all the material 
he needs. 

To explain these figures in detail and the 
method of their representation would be impos- 
sible within the limits of this lecture. To make 
them fully intelligible would require more time 
than is at my disposal and the assistance of 
numerous models and diagrams. I can show 
you only a few of the achieved results (see Figs. 
10-16). This failure to gratify your curiosity as 
regards method is unimportant; for with patience 

[165] 



LECTURES ON ARCHITECTURE 

and intelligence you can develop a method of 
your own, in case the examples I show you have 
the good fortune to please your aesthetic sense. 
That is the final test, and if you fail to find here 
the needed element of beauty my labor has been 
in vain, my logic false, and my philosophy futile. 
If, however, you find here hints and intimations 
of a beauty which does not submit itself to clas- 
sification in any of the familiar categories to 
which labels have already been attached, I com- 
mend the whole matter to your attention as a 
possible contribution to the form-language of the 
future. It possesses the following advantages: 
first, the one already dwelt upon — the relation 
of the ornamental mode to the psychological 
mood; second, the richness of the field, of 




Fig. 15 

[166] 



THE LANGUAGE OF FORM 



which you may gain some idea by comparing 
solid geometry with plane geometry, four- 
dimensional geometry being related to solid 
geometry in a manner analogous to this; third, 
the opportunities offered for originality and the 
expression of individuality 
within wise and reasonable 
limits. The principle once 
assimilated, every designer 
would inevitably apply it 
in an individual manner, 
and yet just by reason of 
its being founded upon a 
principle and not a whim, 
there would result that 
family resemblance which 
we always discern in the 
work of individuals work- 
ing within the limits of 
what we name a style; 
fourth, the principles and 
method are communicable, 

teachable, and though without the aid of a 
highly developed aesthetic sense no fine result 
is possible, it gives to that sense the material 
and a method. 

There is another source of ornament which I 
may mention, of not less symbolical value, for 

[167] 




GROUP: 
TETRAHEDRONS AND 
DERIVED ORNAMENT 

Fig. 17 



LECTURES ON ARCHITECTURE 




Fig. i 8 



KNOTS HOM MA31C ljNES 



it has occult associations. I refer to magic lines 
in magic squares. You all know what a magic 
square is: it is a sort of numerical acrostic, an 
arrangement in square form of numbers which 
yield the same magic sum when added in vertical 
and horizontal columns and along the diagonals. 
Magic squares are of very ancient origin. There 
is one carved in stone on an old temple gate in 
India. Albrecht Durer 
introduced one into his 
engraving of "Melan- 
cholia," and they are 
known to have occupied 
the minds of medi- 
aeval philosophers and 
mystics. Today one 
finds them in the puzzle departments of the maga- 
zines, and the principle of their formation has 
engaged the attention of the followers of pure 
[168] 




KNOCJ FROM A 
MAOKTUHECSF 
THE^E AND (3* 
TOUR. 



Fig. 19 



THE LANGUAGE OF FORM 



mathematics. Now every magic square contains 
a magic line, found by following the numbers in 
their natural order from square to square. These 
magic lines are often very interesting and even 
beautiful, exhibiting an intricate and unusual type 




BOOK COVER DESIGN BASED ON THE 

KNIGHT'S TOUR OR MAGIC 

SQUARE OF EIGHT 

Fig. 20 

of symmetry. Translated into curves and inter- 
laced, they are so strongly reminiscent of Celtic 
interlaces that it suggests the possibility that 
Celtic ornament may have been developed accord- 
ing to this method. Another curious fact in this 

[169] 



LECTURES ON ARCHITECTURE 

connection is that Durer, who, as we know, was 
interested in magic squares, devoted some of his 
inexhaustible industry to the designing of inter- 
lacing knots. 

The decorative value of many magic lines is 
beyond question. To prove this, I need show 
you only one or two: the first and simplest, that 
derived from the magic square of three; the 
second, a magic square of four (see Fig. 19), and 
a decorative treatment of the line traced by the 
knight in making what is known as the knight's 
tour on the chessboard (see Fig. 20). This is a 
familiar feat of chess-players. It consists in 
starting at any square, and by the knight's 
move (two squares forward and one to right 
or left) touching at each square once and return- 
ing to the starting-point. This path or track 
is really a magic line of a magic square, and 
the trick is done by remembering sixty-four 
numbers in a certain order. Kellar, the 
magician, used to introduce this trick in his 
performances. 

Now as the number of magic squares is prac- 
tically limitless, and as each of them yields a 
magic line, you can readily see that there is 
much matter for the designer of ornament, even 
though all magic lines do not lend themselves 
to his particular purpose. 

[170] 



THE LANGUAGE OF FORM 

Besides appropriate and beautiful structural 
forms, appropriate and beautiful ornament, a 
form-language should possess a third element, 
that of color. The great ages of great art reveled 
in color, and each developed it in a distinctive 
way. A Roman bath, a Greek temple, the in- 
terior of a Gothic cathedral, were gorgeous with 
color. Today, in our architecture, we beg the 
whole question of color. It is a confession of 
our incompetence — we are afraid. Into this 
question of color I cannot go in a constructive 
way. To do so, even if I could, does not fall 
within the limits — already overpassed — which I 
have assigned to this lecture. I simply note the 
necessity and leave it there. 

These matters to which I have called your 
attention are after all only bright pebbles picked 
up almost at random on the shoreless ocean of 
beauty, whose tides forever flow beneath the 
very casements of our House of Life. Our 
aesthetic poverty is of our own making; we can 
end it at any moment by utilizing the beauty 
everywhere at hand. There is nothing more 
absurd than to suppose that our age is bankrupt 
of beauty. It is pre-eminently an age of power, 
and power at the ordained season translates 
itself to beauty in men's souls and thence flows 
into visible and ponderable forms. "There is a 

[171] 



LECTURES ON ARCHITECTURE 

fount about to stream." Out of modern civiliza- 
tion, chastened by suffering and sacrifice, awed 
into reverence by supernal revelations, stirred 
into hope by an immanent divine, man will 
weave new patterns on the loom of space just 
as he did anciently in China, in Assyria, in 
Egypt, and in Greece. 

This is the artist's work, and let every artist 
in this audience rededicate himself to the task. 
As was said by Emerson, our great high priest, 
of that beauty which endures, "Fear not the 
new generalization." 



[172] 



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